Rear wheel bearings

Hello, I’m getting about a year or 4000 miles out of the bearings on my road bike rear wheel. They are Giant SLR2’s. I never pressure wash and am very careful with chain cleaning products but this seems like a short life span. I do ride all year round. Is this normal life expectancy? Thanks

The SLR2’s are £900 carbon wheelset so the hubs will be pretty bargain basement in order to squeeze carbon rims into that budget.

If it’s becoming a pain I’d talk to a local wheelbuilder about getting DT’s or Hopes put on there then next time the bearings die.

They may also be lightly shielded to reduce drag at the expense of longevity on a wheel set like that. Doesn’t sound totally unreasonable to me, 4000 miles is probably 4 or 5 years for most bikes.

(Edit – humblebrag?) 🙂

I’ve had bearings go after a few thousand km, I’ve had the same go on for seemingly ever whether stock/OEM or after market hubs. There seems little rhyme nor reason at times. Just treat ’em as a consumable and replace as and when. They don’t cost that much and it’s an easy job.

What bearings are you using when replacing, and what is the failure, play, noise, resistance?

Thanks for the replies, I’ve never attempted a bearing replacement and have always used the LBS ( I will have a look at the tools required ). The failure is play. And not meant to be a humblebrag but I am retired!

Problem really is that you’ve got no idea what they’re fitting. A quality bearing will usually have branding on it though so if you’re up for getting into the wheel as far as a bearing (pulling off the brakeside end cap is usually easiest) and cleaning it up that might give a clue. I’d suspect they’re using cheap ones- nothing really wrong with that but if they are you’d probably benefit from a higher quality one

Hello, I’m getting about a year or 4000 miles out of the bearings on my road bike rear wheel.

I get about the same from all my rear wheels (XDR freehubs). Just seems to be a design fault, the bearings are tiny (2.2mm) and I seem to have to change them every 5000 km, which for me is 6 months or so.

Tried a few different brands of bearings, all seem to be the same. Not tried anything super exotic, just £12-£15 races, which is about £60 a rear wheel with two hub and two freehub bearings.

These were my Zipp 404 bearings after about 5000km, race collapsed and exploded mid ride…

Zipp 404 Freehub bearing by Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr

NB The Zipps are on my summer bike so it only gets ridden between April and September, pretty much dry(ish) miles only.

Bearing replacement is pretty easy with the right tools and quite satisfying.take your time, buy the right tools and it’s done.

There’s nothing particularly bad about those Giant hubs at all. Off the top of my head they run on either 6902 or 6903 bearings in the hub shell so not anything unusual there. and 4000 miles of UK all weather riding isn’t really out of the ordinary lifespan wise for hub body sealed bearings.

If you want to service them yourself. Treat yourself to a cheap hub bearing removal and press kit from AliXpress/Ebay and the job should be a dawdle with very little risk of damaging your hubs.

Not tried anything super exotic, just £12-£15 races, which is about £60 a rear wheel with two hub and two freehub bearings.

Took a bit of planning, but at the moment all the cartridge hubs i have (or, at least, those i replace the bearings in!) use the same 5 or 6 bearings, so i used to buy high end ones in bulk for around a fiver each.

Unfortunately, the decent bearings, fitted properly, last long enough that i haven’t fitted any in probably 3 years and haven’t needed to buy since before COVID… So i’ve now got a bag of random odds and sods and *probably* only enough complete sets to do a front hub.