YADQ: are biltins pre-lubed?

jdnorthrup · YADQ: are biltins pre-lubed?

o mighty skate oracle:

as the title sez: anyone know if biltins are greased up out of the tube?
i got a set, popped them in the wheels, and they seem... a bit slow?
this is compared to my dirty, crappy sector 9 stock bearings.

i did try to check if there was any lube on the biltins, but the way they are recessed made it hard to know.

thanks for any input,
-j

LD skater since 1971

I squirt some powell speed lube in mine to thin out the lube. But one thing with bearings if you skate them long enough the lube will spins out and the bearing will spin more freely.
You want lube in your skateboard bearings because they are carrying a load which is you and they spin many revolutions over the miles.

But my other hobby I do and I am doing less now days was yoyo's we would soak our bearings in mineral sprits. Run them dry so we would get max spin time with no response.But under a load a dry bearing would wear out faster. I would add a little powell speed lube to my yoyo bearings because I would want a little response.

Also we did some test with different bearing abec ratings in spin time on yoyo which is not under a load in longest sleeper mode. If you ran dry bearings on all yoyos would spin exactly or same times the lower abecs would beat the higher abec bearings.

The only thing that would beat the metal bearing yoyos is a ceramic bearings. I have read ceramic bearings will crumble under the load of ollie in skateboarding.
One thing nice about Biltin bearings is the bearing running on a combo it looks like a thick machined spacer,seat,speedwasher. So with side to side movement of pumping you have a solid seated bearing with no play.

I still have some old Powell swiss bearing on my old slalom board. The Biltins because of the combo purpose built bearings are faster. If we had them back them I would have used them for slalom racing.

The only thing close to them was company called Yale had some and other companies but basically they were a thin galvanized thin metal tubing with one end put in a press to press the washer end in to the tube.
plus the bearing were crap that they used mainly on roller skates.
Chris Chauput just made the concept of the combo bearing,spacer , speed washer bullet proof for downhill speed skateboarding and slalom.

Sorry about the long post on bearings but us yoyo players have studied them to the point that it makes you want to puke their is so much information on them. It has gotten to the point that they buy these special gold plated bearings,races,casing, sheilds that only last for about two months of use and cost $15.00 to $25.00 for one bearing from Japan. The R/C cars guys have done the same thing with bearings.

jdnorthrup

wow, thanks for the detailed and entertaining post.The tradeoffs you mention make a lot of sense.

J

northcoast

Alec

There are ceramic bearings, ceramic bearings and then there are ceramic bearings. Wink

Some (very few) are 100% ceramic, races, balls.

Then there are the steel races, cages with ceramic balls

And finally there are those with ceramic coated balls.

LD skater since 1971

I was posting about the 100% ceramic ball bearings their almost like glass. Kind of like the 100% ceramic knifes that stay really sharp.