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PLASTICS AND BALLS

EXAMINATION OF GREASES FOR WHEEL BEARINGS

Alexander LEBEDEV,
Ivan KSENOFONTOV
(Article in the «Ìîòî»  Magazine ¹08, 2002 )

Balls run over their races in bearings a million times in one day and remain intact thanks to a special grease.

IN A RUT

Man has been convinced of the saying "You will get nowhere unless you grease the wheels" from time immemorial. The axles of ancient Egyptian chariots refused outright to rotate dry in the races. Therefore, they were "anointed" with lime-thickened olive oil, which lent the mixture a certain plasticity.  Over the past centuries  basically nothing has changed just as the wheel has not changed: modern bearings also require greases (G).
Today dozens of kinds of G are available  for sale. Which of them suits motorcycle wheels to reliably serve the balls of both a sports bike and the ancient Ural motorcycle? When choosing G samples for examination we studied first inscriptions on packages …

 

DISADVANTAGEOUS!

…and we made a discovery: the names of lubricating greases did not contain a single word of information useful to a consumer. Nobody in the former Soviet Union, nowadays in Russia and abroad has managed to invent "symbols" disclosing the qualitative parameters of G. 

So we had to ask sales assistances which grease was "the best among equals".  And we were “showered” with a mountain of various cans, tubes and little boxes. However, not everyone was allowed to take an examination. And do you know why? Because we understood the position of a normal consumer: it takes just  a thimbleful of a grease to "anoint" motorcycle bearings and yet salespeople were offering   it  in amounts of 300 and more grams. Which would be enough for a quarry dump truck. One has to pay for it a considerable amount of money and a package's storage life is 2-3 years, so such a purchase is not advantageous.

THROUGH WATER, FIRE AND …PASCALS

We started testing G with water. It is as clear as day that oil should not be washed off. And so we pitilessly heated in water part of the contents of each of the ten packages. The methodology was standard: we soaked the samples for three hours in a hot  'bath" and then put them through a laboratory analysis to make sure that the water had not penetrated the G. And we could state that all the test samples had proven their ability to protect  bearings against moisture, that is, against corrosion.


















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