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Roller crank vs. shell bearings..

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark Harrop
  • Start date Start date
Come on propflux man, you've quoted me but ignored just about everything I wrote!

and when your a sponser that craps out 500k+ per engine with plains, and close to $1Mil with rollers, do the math..hmmmm, one race...tore down...both can rev to 16k...$500k vs 1 mil.... one race...you get my point there

There's no way a roller bearing crank costs twice what a plain bearing does!!

As for the turbine engine, yes, radial loads are light, seems a PERFECT environment for a bearing which relies in a film of oil to maintain clearance.

There are other factors, as I implied, which dictate the choice of bearing in gas turbine engines. Roller bearings are NOT chosen in this application for their "strength". ( Note I mean ability to take load )

As for a plain crank not wearing much? most automotive engine i see have to have the cranks turned down at EVERY rebuild,

In this country, almost no car engines are rebuilt before the vehicle is scrapped. By far the vast majority of plain bearing cranks will outlast the rest of the vehicle given adequate maintenance. As I said (if you would just READ my posts) and I quote myself:"Would a roller bearing crank have lasted longer? Very possibly, but who cares? The point is that given proper care, a plain bearing crank will last as long as the rest of the bike. "


This is the reasons i am saying that a plain is used for cost-efficiency Vs a roller.

The very first thing I wrote in this thread was: "Main reasons would be manufacturing based, i.e. that plain bearing cranks are cheaper to make and are probably quieter and therefore more easily fit into recent noise regs"

Do you really think there will be alot of these new 15000RPM plus plain bearing superbikes running around 20 years from now WITHOUT having had an overhaul??

No of course I don't!!! I've already said as much. A roller will always last longer, all other things being equal. But the original question was about strength, not decades of durability! I have already mentioned Kent Stotz's championship winning 500bhp Honda Blackbird , and there are literally hundreds of blown Busa's in cars and bikes out there, some with nitrous, proving the strength issue. Very long term durability? Rollers every time. :wink:

One last point: I am rebuilding currently a GS1150 motor for a customer. I have just taken the (roller) crank to my crank specialist to be rebuilt. Why? Because the #1 big end had gone.
 
brit there is a complete set of 1150 rods on ebay now for a 100 bucks...they are new
 
Brit, well said. The Kawasaki problem is the only one I can think of, and that may well be aggravated by the abuse that bikes get over here: bikes are often subjected to gas-diluted oil, 3-year-in-the-bike oil, and now extended-wheelie lack of oil. Plain bearings are much more than just adequate, otherwise the manufacturers would not put them in their technical marvels. At the extreme edge of use, rollers will do better. This thread started because someone wondered if it was simply an A vs B choice, and if B costs $100 more then we would gladly pay it. The problem is that for the manufacturers, that $100 has to be multiplied by hundreds of thousands of units which equals tens of millions of dollars. Demand for rollers has not yet overcome that kind of financial inertia.
 
I believe that Mr. Suzuki chose rollers because he was in that business. :D
 
Thanks for the tip Chris, but by the time I got them over here with shipping and import duty, they'd be twice that! Hopefully I only need one rod anyway. :(

Thanks for the kind words Don. Kawa's have alwyas been known to be weaker over here, with problems with cranks, valve seats, head wear etc. Honda's on the other hand have a rep for being bulletproof, with bikes like the CX500 and NTV650 (plain bearing cranks) racking up huge mileages in the hands of despatch riders. (do you have those?) I'm talking 200,000 miles plus in some cases, with no strip downs and only adequate maintenance.
 
Brit, maybe I was wrong, But I though strength = Durability.... :twisted:
 
Well, in engineering terms no. Strength in engineering terms, as far as I understand it, relates to a material or components ability to resist loads.

Therefore a "strong" crank will resist 400bhp, whereas the "weaker" one will break at 300bhp. However if both cranks are only subjected to 200bhp, the "weaker " one may well last twice as long and would therefore be more durable.

I know that in the US, the word durable is used a lot more than it is over here, and it has suffered from definition creep! :wink:

Britain and America. Two nations divided by a common language. :D
 
Its a pie with the crust on the top instead of the bottom. They usually come in apple, peach, blueberry, cherry, etc. :-) :-) :-) :-)

Earl

Hap Call said:
My question has more to do with nomenclature...what are Cobblers? :wink:

Hap
 
revolution

revolution

Lots of good info...just like I've come to expect from this site. I feel G'd up on cranks now. (G'd up is hip hop slang my kids use, means informed)

But when I read this...
"Cobblers!"

I had to spit my drink back in the glass.

Thanks for the info guys. But why is there no selection of bearing shells for my GS or gixxer 750?
 
Re: revolution

Re: revolution

Mark Harrop said:
.

Thanks for the info guys. But why is there no selection of bearing shells for my GS or gixxer 750?

Thats because so many wore out so quick they cannot keep up with demand....(sorry, I just couldn't resist!) :twisted:
 
Re: revolution

Re: revolution

propflux01 said:
Mark Harrop said:
.

Thanks for the info guys. But why is there no selection of bearing shells for my GS or gixxer 750?

Thats because so many wore out so quick they cannot keep up with demand....(sorry, I just couldn't resist!) :twisted:

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Seriously though, bikes are always like this and it pisses me off. With cars there is a whole industry supplying reconditioned this, that and the other. With bikes I think the manufacturers want you to do 2000 miles a year max on sunny days and then throw it away after a couple of years and buy a new one.
I think the Japs think that their engines will never go wrong. To some extent they're right, and this together with the fact that relatively few bikes are sold anyway means that there's not enough demand to make supply of oversize bearing shells viable.

Here's a thing too; Suzuki go to all the trouble of putting roller bearings on their cranks, and then run the cams directly in the head! To make things worse, because the cranks got rollers, there's hardly any oil pressure in the system to get oil up to the top end. Crazy!
 
Last roller engine I can think of that used cam bearings was a kawasaki Z-1. Have to admit HP wise the GS is a far superior engine but those Z-1`s were tough as heck. Stright cut gear on the hub,steel clutch hub,camshaft bearings....dang good engine. I may try and locate one someday...actually found a black 80 model Z-1R locally....yeah I feel that painful feeling of my wife raising the roof...maybe she won`t see it for a few months. 8O
 
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