I heard that new sealed bearings don’t have much grease from the factory. I was rebuilding a pto clutch for a garden tractor so I thought I’d check. Yup. Not enough to fry a couple eggs. This is an SKF. I packed it with wheel bearing grease and it should last another 45 years. 1980 Case 448.
It may come as a shock to you, it did me, but that ball bearing was actually properly greased as you found it...if you packed it full then it is now "over greased", and believe it or not, that can cause almost as much trouble as under greased. Due to availability, I occasionally will use a sealed or shielded bearing in a spot where it is not needed, so the seals/shields are simply removed and left out, they are always about half full like that when opened up, regardless of brand or price point. In industry, over greasing was (is?) much more common than under greasing (as a matter of maintenance) and therefore responsible for more down time than under greasing. After we went through the "lubrication training" at work we completely rewrote our lube schedule and procedure...in most cases there was simply too much grease being put in at any one time, but in a few cases, it was also being done too often. Looking back, we very likely did have a couple failures from it too...I know our local motor shop says that over greasing is actually one of the common reasons that they see for electric motor failure too (3 phase/large industrial motors) If you think about it, most modern cars have no grease points on them, and the wheel bearings are sealed/unserviceable, but still last a couple hundred thousand miles often times...and if you have ever taken the seals out after replacing a sealed wheel bearing, then you've seen that they are only about half filled with grease. There is plenty of info out there regarding this topic...here's a start. The Dangers of Overgreasing How to Kill a Bearing: Over greasing | JAX INC.
Full of grease stops the balls from rolling and skating starts. Although we had to pop the seals and fully pack a bunch of bearings for the food industry.
Slow speed stainless steel bearings on a processing machine in a wet environment. Supposedly worked good.
Every answer you got it the original post is 100% correct and packing the bearing full did no favors to it. Grease is just a base oil in a carrier basically so it stays in place better, as it gets hot it becomes more liquid. Think of how much 2 cycle oil is required to keep a saw bearing alive at 12-14000 rpm ? Less than the grease that was in the bearing originally before the repack, bearing companies know what should be in them and no they don’t short them so they can sell you another one.
I have at least 1 u joint bearing in the 4 wd axle on my F350 that is dry as a pop corn fart . I must confess a case of under maintenance. I'll pump a bunch in there . Hopefully get another out change worth of miles out of it . Really , it should be changed out . And yes I should have annually greased it .
I bought ungreasble ones on mine when they were changed, the original non greaseable ones made 150,000 figured why bother with the others.
