Originally Posted by
unterhausen
is it possible to upgrade the bearings?
Absolutely! Lots of replacements out there. But all bearings are not alike...
As far as bearing replacement goes, I'd look at Hambini on YouTube for suggestions. He evaluated all of the common replacement radial and angular contact sealed cartridge bearings on his site.
He concludes that ceramic bearings are not worth the money. And he finds SKF and NTN are the smoothest and the most durable. Others such as Enduro he wasn't too impressed with. I happened to be having a rear tandem hub serviced by a manufacturer and I happened to bring up bearings. "Why don't you use Enduro? They're local." The reply was something like, "Um we choose not to use that brand!" with a smirk on his face. He refused to go into detail but he made it pretty clear that they chose to not devalue their products by using Enduro bearings. Wow, that was kind of a surprise! But then Hambini said basically the same thing. So take that for what it's worth. Given the difficulty in servicing the SD hubs, I'd be sure to pick the highest quality replacement I could find.
I just took delivery of an SD-8 and was perusing the interwebs for service info. Thanks again for the great info, ThermionicScott!