Life Improvement of Ball Bearings for Motorcycles

Nowadays, bearings for motorcycle engines are required to be compact and light weight and have a considerably high performance.

In order to meet these requirements, two measures were developed, that is High Refining Steel (HRS) and Special Heat Treatment (SH Treatment). In this paper described are the characteristics of HRS and SH Treatment and the results of investigation on them.

The investigation results show that bearings of HRS and bearings with SH Treatment have more than twice longer life than standard bearings, particularly the bearings with SH Treatment have longer life even under lubricating conditions with a low viscous lubricating oil or with a contaminated lubricating oil. As a matter of fact, the bearings of HRS and the bearings with SH Treatment are used for the motorcycle engines and show excellent performances.