bocabearingslarry

Thanks Capt.Bob. As far as flushing bearings, if you're going to clean a rubber sealed bearing, remove the seals and you can soak them in a spray brake cleaner or spray carburetor cleaner. These cleaners have acetone and toluene which are great grease cutters and they dry clean. Soak the bearings in a glass jar overnight and pull them and blow them out with compressed air. If you have an air compressor great, if not you can use the cans of compressed air used to blow out computers. Blow the bearings out, add 1 seal, add 1 or 2 drops max of light oil, install the other seal and you're ready to go (be careful not to push the seal too far in). For shielded hybrid bearings you can leave the shields on and soak them the same way. Pull them and drop the oil directly on the shield. The oil will dissipate through the shield and reinstall the bearings. As far as mixing oils go, I wouldn't do it. I would just clean and start fresh. The ceramic balls don't need much lubrication to begin with, they're low friction and if you put too much oil in them they're just not going to spin freely. Whatever you do, don't put hot sauce on hybrids it just wont work. Hot sauce will work on stainless but it's a waste on ceramic balls. REM Oil works well because it's very light. We also sell a synthetic oil that can be run on ceramic balls or stainless. We sell it in a 12cc syringe and it works very well for hybrid bearings.

For hybrid bearings with ceramic balls, you can run the bearings dry or oiled with out any loss of performance. The ceramic balls are lighter and denser than the stainless steel balls and they have a slight chatter to them when they spin because of the speed of the bearing. By adding a drop of high speed oil it lubes the races and balls and quiets them down. Oiling the bearing also increases the life of the races and cage by keeping everything lubed up. If you are going to oil your bearings make sure you use an oil that is designed to be used with ceramic ball bearings like our high speed oil. Stay away from oils that claim to bond to stainless steel bearings. Since the bearings in the hybrids are ceramic that type of oil will gum up the inside of the bearings because the oil will not be able to penetrate the ceramic balls causing the bearings to spin roughly. It really comes down to preference, oiling them will keep them quiet. Running them dry will let you run them without having to constantly oil them and maintaining them. I recommend running them oiled with the seal/shields on. If you have any questions just let me know.