Steering Head Bottom Bearing

[Andy1970]

Hi Everyone,


Just wanted to share this, which I found in Homebase today. It's a furniture leg, it cost me around four quid and it's exactly the right size to install the bottom head bearing onto the shaft. It had a plastic foot on the bottom which you need to remove, and the top is a metal plate perfect for hitting with a hammer.


It also comes in a variety of colours. 


Andy

[Bretty]

Installing them is the easy bit and can be done with a variety of persuasion sticks (hammers). ;-)

Getting the foccers out/off in the first place is the tricky bit. I think I pretty much used up all my swear words when I did mine.

[Andy1970]

Yeah, I took mine to a local mechanic who was willing to hit it much harder than I was.    He got it off in about a minute and charged me the price of a drink.

[joebloggs]

I drifted the lower bearing out with a length of 10mm stainless round bar, no taper, three or four taps with a rubber mallet, job done, re seating the new one was a different matter, bastard took bloody ages even after leaving it in the freezer for a couple of days

[Andy1970]

Yeah, getting the outer races into the headstock was more difficult than I'd expected. I'd planned to draw them in using a threaded bar and a couple of large washers that I'd ground to size. That worked, but only by winding on as much tension in the bar and washers as I could, and then tapping the washer with a hammer, then re-tightening the bar and repeating.

[Jules-C]

Replaced my head bearings with taper roller ones a while ago but the new bearing shells don't project as far out as the original ball ones so not sure there's enough lip to be able to drift them out