Looking to replace the pivot bearings on my bike. There seems to be a massive range in price for the same thing. Budget bearings coming in at under £4 each and SKF coming in at £12 each.
Where is best to buy them from and what brands should I look at getting?
Thanks

Look at Katec on ebay.

Any branded bearing should be fine (INA,FAG,SKF – search the brand online if you worried), as most chinese bearing are not branded. Personally I wouldn’t use anything not branded, but that my choice.. as I don’t want to have to repeat the same bearing swap again 2 minutes later. Lots of ppl on ebay selling bearings, the rather interesting Katec get a lot of love on here* but I’ve found others selling branded cheaper..

*I think because his opinions are mad as box of frog but his bearing are fine & usually well priced

BETD for bearings, the generally sell Enduro and do frame packs or will make them up for you at excellent prices.

http://www.akbearings.co.uk/default.asp?

AK bearings are the cheapest genuine decent brand bearings I can find, I’ve tried other apparently top quality bearings from well know sellers on ebay but they didn’t last so I’m not convinced they weren’t chinese copies.

Where is best to buy them from and what brands should I look at getting?

Pivot bearings like everything else MTB tend to be wildly over specified.

A top-quality bearing will be rated up to 25,000 rpm a budget one say 15,000 and the very crappest of the crap will be 10,000 rpm. Are your pivot bearings rotating at 10,000 rpm? Nope.

Similarly side loadings will be the same to within fractions of a kN. The expensive bearings look good and are nicely machined, maybe better grease or better seals but unless they are being used in a really demanding application (F1 car, aeroplane) they’re not necessary.

I picked up 12 Chinese 6800s for £5 a few years ago they fit and work fine. Maybe if it’s wheel bearings then fair enough but pivot bearings?

£5 for 12 or £15 each hmmmmmm

I’d suggest you were very lucky RM, as most ppl’s experience is far from happy when using chinese ones. An engineer I worked with was constantly battling his bosses to avoid chinese bearing, as he’d have to swap them out so often, so any saving made was wasted on time lost. There was a thread about someone who bought some stupid amount of bearings for pennies, then spent the next year swapping those same bearing ever other week.. Personally I see it as a gamble (roulette anyone?) and prefer to play it safe.

Buy bearings from kaesae (katec) but more importantly – step away from the pressure washer.

The best example of cheap bearings has to be the science centre tower in Glasgow. The highest structure in the city, the idea was that it was to rotate through 360 degrees, which worked fine, until the cheap Nigerian bearings packed in.

Oh dear.

rocketman – Member

A top-quality bearing will be rated up to 25,000 rpm a budget one say 15,000 and the very crappest of the crap will be 10,000 rpm. Are your pivot bearings rotating at 10,000 rpm? Nope.

Ironically with pivots it’s the opposite, lack of rotation causes problems. Spinning a bearing really fast in a clean environment just isn’t very relevant to us, I think that’s half the problem, we take parts optimised for one job and do something different with them.

No doubt you can get good cheap bearings but it’s the luck of the draw element that makes it not worthwhile imo- I bought a box of 5, 2 were DOA, casing on a third shattered when I went to fit it. One lasted a short time, the 5th weirdly lasted incredibly well. The whole lot cost less than one quality bearing but the buy price is outweighed by the hassle.

I’m a fan of cheap bearings. Hope ProII rear wheel had a set of cheap bearing two years ago, 2500+ miles on my commute/touring bike still smooth, no play I think I paid £10 on ebay. I paid £22 for a set of 10 bearings for my Specialised FSR, now eight months old , no play.

rocketman – Member

Pivot bearings like everything else MTB tend to be wildly over specified.

A top-quality bearing will be rated up to 25,000 rpm a budget one say 15,000 and the very crappest of the crap will be 10,000 rpm. Are your pivot bearings rotating at 10,000 rpm? Nope.

Similarly side loadings will be the same to within fractions of a kN. The expensive bearings look good and are nicely machined, maybe better grease or better seals but unless they are being used in a really demanding application (F1 car, aeroplane) they’re not necessary.

I picked up 12 Chinese 6800s for £5 a few years ago they fit and work fine. Maybe if it’s wheel bearings then fair enough but pivot bearings?

They’ll be using standard industry bearings though, and so they are massively over-specced for mountain bike use.
But, material difference would be a potential bigger concern in the UK than whether the bearing could withstand a certain rpm or thrust load etc.
I’ve had cheap headset bearings turn to rust within a very short space of time – admittedly because the sealing was rubbish and I should have stripped them sooner. But on the flipside of that, the SKF bearings in the headset of another bike show no signs of rust after a lot more mistreatment. They are better sealed, but I suspect even if I ran them dry they would bear up a lot better than the cheap ones.

OP, I’d just go for a brand name at a mid-price, rather than bargain basement eBay specials.