With the winter slop a'coming, I'm thinking it's time for a bit of preemptive maintenance on the Hollowtech bracket, rather than fit the new bearings waiting in the toolkit. I've got some Seriously Purple grease, but there must be better, and I've seen 'marine grease' mentioned in the past. What's recommended?
The plan would be to fit the new bearings in the Spring.
I use mobil xhp 222
As Phil, I use xhp 222
Given how cheap they are, I struggled to justify what felt like faff to remove, repack and reinstall. However, I do have a very old tub of Castrol marine grease and it is very good at lasting a decent length of time. However, I've not been able to find it again, but it is almost 30 years old.
If you shop around, you can find these for just under £20 new. Sometimes they're as low as £15 in the sales.
At that price IMO they're not worth the hassle of re-packing.
The difficult bit, ime, is getting the plastic top-hat spacers out without breaking them, they're quite brittle, so while it's entirely possible, it's also quite easy to kill them in the process. If they feel rough to rotate, they might be goosed already if they don't, I'd be tempted to just ride them over the winter then fit new in the spring. It's not like the replacement bearings are insanely expensive, as has already been pointed out.
Righto, thanks for the thoughts, chaps.
I investigated the XHP 222 stuff, but only seems to be available in tubes for mounting in a grease gun, and rather too big for my purposes. Couldn't really work out how to store it once opened. A bit of poking around found a v small tub (30g) of this grease for about a tenner. Yes, stupidly expensive per litre, obviously, but it's convenience that's won out this time, as it can live in the bottom of the toolbox. So I'll try that tomorrow when it's persisting down and see how I get on. If it fails, I have spare bearings to bosh in anyway.
Ta
This BB has been £8.50 at Merlin for the best part of the year. I can't see it going up for BF!