Wednesday, April 8, 2015

BEARING ODYSSEY 4/8/2015

After riding the lower elevations of Idaho City I decided to retire the AT81’s and put  a Trials Tire on the TE250.


While I had the wheel off the drive side bearing felt dry so I decided to change the bearings.
Didn’t want to find a bad bearing on a ridge top or the bottom of deep drainage.



The brake side came out as normal. On the drive side I never could find the edge of the bearing with the drift.
I had to resort to using the flange of the spindle from my tire basket to grab meat of the bearing .

There was a plastic spacer between the bearing and the hub !
 
WTF !



I gave CycleBuy a call explained my issue . The gal said Arran  was on the phone to KTM about the same issue !
A local customer had called the day before.  Arran would call me back with what he found out.
While waiting on Arran I talked to to Dan at Munn Racing . He had never seen such a thing and had no clue.

Arran called me back and said I should put the spacer back in.
The first “genius “ said no bikes have the spacer and the second “genius” said all the KTM bearing kits have the spacer.
Told him mine did not !

David Jones pointed me to this thread on KTMTalk - http://www.ktmtalk.com/showthread.php?t=503789&hc_location=ufi

The SX & XC models now have a larger axle & different hub than the XCW’s  (TE’s) utilizing the distance spacer.

By this time
Karl joined the comments. Karl owns a KTM shop in Iceland.
Confirmed the TE250 should not have the spacer and the axles are different from the SX/XC’s.


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TE250

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250XC with distance spacer .



I assembled the hub with old spacer but it was still driving me nuts.

I ordered new bearings and a distance ring from Rocky Mountain.

Removed the bearings and  mic’d the hub.

Drive side cavity – 23.8 mm/ brake side –20.5 mm/ spacer  3.0 mm

The spacer actually centers the spacer tube in the hub.
image
The bearing is seated on the tube not the spacer.

It looks as if I have an orphan hub that was machined to the wrong
depth – same as the SX/XC specs.

A neat thing I learned with all this is that Karl called me from Reykjavik
using the FaceBook Messenger !
Pretty Cool – “free” international calls with an internet connection.

Karl will be making a road trip through the west with his wife and dad this fall.
Hope he decides to visit Idaho !

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