Question for those familiar with adjustable BBs: Is this amount of wear on the cups and spindle ok to keep using?
It’s out of a track bike that’s done not much more than 1000km, and only ever indoor. I’m not a heavy rider but the BB was overtightened by the shop that assembled it (I only just realised). Once back together it was very difficult to get it tight enough to have no play without there being some grinding of the bearings. So have I totalled it by assuming that the bike shop assembled it ok from the start?
Those bearing surfaces are fine and should run for years (no guarantees though). You should only be concerned if there is too much uneven wear visible (usually related to the power stroke on one side only).
A certain amount of bearing preload is actually good according to Jobst Brandt (bearings are his day job). Unpolished bearing surfaces (yours look polished) needed reasonable preload initially to knock off the high spots anyway, otherwise they went loose in the first month.
Has the BB been properly faced and the threads cleaned with a 2-piece tap? If there is a slight misalignment, it is difficult or impossible to adjust the bearings to ‘no play, no preload’. Not many shops do that nowadays.
The bearing surfaces look fine, they don’t appear to have any pitting or sections where the “wear path” (for want of a better term) narrows or widens indicating that there is a misalign/tight spot/out of round.
Is the “unseen” cup in similar condition ? I guess it’s still in the frame.
The path is not very wide, so there’s a bit more life in the cups & spindle yet.
I’d be tempted to go to said LBS and kick 'em in the nuts, if anything just for fun :evil:
But yeah as the others said there doesn’t seem to be any adverse pitting/chunks present, so with meticulous adjustment it should be fine Nath.
Thanks for the replies! Both cups were worn the same, and the line looks fairly uniform. The BB shell had facing marks on it so I guess that was done somewhere along the line too. Thanks again for the info!
Hey Nath i forgot to tell you this last night but the BB in those Felts come pre-assembled from the supplier/manufacturer.
It was not the bike stores fault for bad assembly, however i do think that they should have checked that it ran smooth and was tight. If they had of checked this and everything was ok then they wuold have had no need to adjust it.
