Hi All. I made one set useing Timken rollor bearings. But I don't have a 88 to try it on. BTW, will it fit on any other model ? Im going to try it some day and see if it will fit on the 85 notchie.
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04:16 PM
mrfiero Member
Posts: 9003 From: Colorful Colorado Registered: Mar 99
I used the Duralast bearing on the rear of my 88 GT and got 500 miles out of them before a failure. One of the rear bearings shifted inward on the race and ate the brake bracket and the back of the rotor. The whole assembly turned blue from all the heat it built up. My opinion only but if you go with the cheap parts trying to save a little money your going to regret it and then spend the money for the proper part anyway. Save yourself the money and agrivation and just purchase the high quality part in the first place.
I used the Duralast bearing on the rear of my 88 GT and got 500 miles out of them before a failure. One of the rear bearings shifted inward on the race and ate the brake bracket and the back of the rotor. The whole assembly turned blue from all the heat it built up. My opinion only but if you go with the cheap parts trying to save a little money your going to regret it and then spend the money for the proper part anyway. Save yourself the money and agrivation and just purchase the high quality part in the first place.
Exactly what he said. I work for autozone and our duralast bearings are more less something to get you by. I see it almost everyday one coming back defective but about 70% of the time its the installers fault ie: bad spindle torque too much (mainly) or too little. If its gonna go on a really nice ride (my car) I wouldn't hesitate to pay the extra money for a better bearing considering if im zipping over 100+ mph I don't want my tire flying off. I may not have an 88 fiero but im gonna tell you personally its not a genuine bearing.
I used the Duralast bearing on the rear of my 88 GT and got 500 miles out of them before a failure. One of the rear bearings shifted inward on the race and ate the brake bracket and the back of the rotor. The whole assembly turned blue from all the heat it built up. My opinion only but if you go with the cheap parts trying to save a little money your going to regret it and then spend the money for the proper part anyway. Save yourself the money and agrivation and just purchase the high quality part in the first place.
Right. The cost of a tow will cover the cost of a better bearing. Not to mention the damage to other parts when it melts down, & the risk to your life. Bearings & brakes are the ONE place (if you need just ONE) that you shouldn't cheap out. ~ Paul aka "Tha Driver"
I'm sure these are all the same bearings no matter who sells it. I'm quite sure they are all from the same China manufacturer in different boxes. I was going to have some made but I'll wait and see how these hold up. If they are OK I will probably not have any made.
I would like to see results of a radiographic spark test on them to see what alloy we're dealing with here. And maybe some hardness measurements on the hub AND the studs. And no matter what the tests show, I would rather have The RodMan make them so we know what we got AND to keep the cash out of Mao's account. Boo China! And now they are hacking our military!! WTF?? We might have to go all Been Hidin on em.
Remember, our real, Made-in-USA hubs are still available at the Fiero Store.
I have to say, even I was surprised when AutoZone added the DuraLast Fiero hub from China. Their DuraLast vendor is the one bringing in that unit, so it's been available, but the cost of carrying it was out of line with potential sales.
There are significant differences in every part of the construction, machining, engineering, and so on and so on between ours and the Chinese hubs, as we've discussed many times on may other threads. Short story is the hub unit we supply to the Fiero Store is the same hub unit we had approved by GM to fill their needs after they stopped making these hubs in their Sandusky plant. But GM then decided it would be cheaper to simply not bother carrying the 88 front hub in their system at all, and they'd risk the ire of those few owners. On our side, we were busy with other projects, and the 88 Fiero front hub project languished until several years ago, when I agreed to follow up on my promise to have them made, and my former company agreed to the tooling, etc., and start production to the approved drawings.
So why are the Chinese making this hub unit? It's pretty simple, really. The bearing company in China didn't mean to; they don't know or care what a Fiero is, or what any of these cars are, they don't know the production quantities, engineering specs, nothing. What these companies do know is what's in the bearing catalogs they bring home from trade shows. They take the catalog back to the factory, and try to produce lookalikes of the entire list, from beginning to end. There is some rudimentary engineering, but it would scare you to know how little. The primary purpose of their "engineering" is to make sure the fewest components are used to produce the widest range of bearings possible. If they end up making some part numbers that don't fit anything, or fail right away, so what. Their job is to make it look mostly like the right thing to a cursory inspection, and that it goes round and round in your hand. If the application in service doesn't work well and fails often, well, they're halfway round the world, and good luck to you, since there's another guy right behind you who doesn't know any better or is willing to take a chance. And another behind him.
The fellow above who said he had a REAR wheel bearing go bad is a great example. Everybody in the bearing business has been making that hub (513011) since around 1980-1981 ... it fits all the first-gen GM FWD cars. For years, it was the highest volume hub, the price point setter and loss leader. If, after THIRTY YEARS, you can't figure out how to make THAT hub unit properly, what chance do you have with anything even remotely more sophisticated? Plus, in the Fiero, it's a rear hub, which means far less wear and tear. That's just plain scary.
Why are our hubs more expensive? Well, it costs a LOT to do it right, no, a LOT. Chinese aftermarket manufacturers generally skip many of the basics such as ... engineering, testing, getting the proper tooling and components, performing proper machining, grease, decent bearings, and so on.
Also, it's good to remember the economics of the situation ... virtually every bearing manufacturer in China is state-owned, state-financed, and state-run. They often do a pretty good job of hiding that in layers of ownership, but what that means is there is no profit motive, just production and employment. They also like to get dollars, no matter what the cost. Bearing manufacturers in China rarely have any idea about costs, report bogus sales and employment numbers, and so on. The central government is supposed to be cracking down, but the local politicians want the jobs and growth to continue ... there's a saying in China: "The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away." This doesn't just apply to the way they think about Beijing, it also applies to the way they think about you, a consumer half a world away.
This is not to say there are not great bearing manufacturers in China. There are, and I have the pleasure of dealing with many of them regularly. But the vast majority, particularly the ones making only replacement parts, are almost unbelievably bad.
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10:42 AM
Will Member
Posts: 14278 From: Where you least expect me Registered: Jun 2000
Remember, our real, Made-in-USA hubs are still available at the Fiero Store.
I have to say, even I was surprised when AutoZone added the DuraLast Fiero hub from China. Their DuraLast vendor is the one bringing in that unit, so it's been available, but the cost of carrying it was out of line with potential sales.
There are significant differences in every part of the construction, machining, engineering, and so on and so on between ours and the Chinese hubs, as we've discussed many times on may other threads. Short story is the hub unit we supply to the Fiero Store is the same hub unit we had approved by GM to fill their needs after they stopped making these hubs in their Sandusky plant. But GM then decided it would be cheaper to simply not bother carrying the 88 front hub in their system at all, and they'd risk the ire of those few owners. On our side, we were busy with other projects, and the 88 Fiero front hub project languished until several years ago, when I agreed to follow up on my promise to have them made, and my former company agreed to the tooling, etc., and start production to the approved drawings.
So why are the Chinese making this hub unit? It's pretty simple, really. The bearing company in China didn't mean to; they don't know or care what a Fiero is, or what any of these cars are, they don't know the production quantities, engineering specs, nothing. What these companies do know is what's in the bearing catalogs they bring home from trade shows. They take the catalog back to the factory, and try to produce lookalikes of the entire list, from beginning to end. There is some rudimentary engineering, but it would scare you to know how little. The primary purpose of their "engineering" is to make sure the fewest components are used to produce the widest range of bearings possible. If they end up making some part numbers that don't fit anything, or fail right away, so what. Their job is to make it look mostly like the right thing to a cursory inspection, and that it goes round and round in your hand. If the application in service doesn't work well and fails often, well, they're halfway round the world, and good luck to you, since there's another guy right behind you who doesn't know any better or is willing to take a chance. And another behind him.
The fellow above who said he had a REAR wheel bearing go bad is a great example. Everybody in the bearing business has been making that hub (513011) since around 1980-1981 ... it fits all the first-gen GM FWD cars. For years, it was the highest volume hub, the price point setter and loss leader. If, after THIRTY YEARS, you can't figure out how to make THAT hub unit properly, what chance do you have with anything even remotely more sophisticated? Plus, in the Fiero, it's a rear hub, which means far less wear and tear. That's just plain scary.
Why are our hubs more expensive? Well, it costs a LOT to do it right, no, a LOT. Chinese aftermarket manufacturers generally skip many of the basics such as ... engineering, testing, getting the proper tooling and components, performing proper machining, grease, decent bearings, and so on.
Also, it's good to remember the economics of the situation ... virtually every bearing manufacturer in China is state-owned, state-financed, and state-run. They often do a pretty good job of hiding that in layers of ownership, but what that means is there is no profit motive, just production and employment. They also like to get dollars, no matter what the cost. Bearing manufacturers in China rarely have any idea about costs, report bogus sales and employment numbers, and so on. The central government is supposed to be cracking down, but the local politicians want the jobs and growth to continue ... there's a saying in China: "The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away." This doesn't just apply to the way they think about Beijing, it also applies to the way they think about you, a consumer half a world away.
This is not to say there are not great bearing manufacturers in China. There are, and I have the pleasure of dealing with many of them regularly. But the vast majority, particularly the ones making only replacement parts, are almost unbelievably bad.
Thanks again for your input. It's very gratifying to see a vendor take interest in supplying quality parts to the Fiero community.
What do you think of adapting tapered roller bearings to the Fiero hub, as outlined here: https://www.fiero.nl/forum/F...HTML/116656.html#p31 And more generally of tapered roller hubs vs ball bearing hubs. I @$$ume that OEM's went to ball bearing hubs because they're cheaper?
Hmmm ... the tapered conversion using the 513009 is ... fascinating. GM initially made some hubs as tapered bearings and some as ball bearings; the tapered units went into heavy cars and such because they didn't want a repeat of the first-gen Toro/Eldo situation. They also put them in trucks with tapers. For a number of reasons, GM gradually came to favor the ball bearing units. Back in the Good Old Days of U.S. auto production, GM ran that Sandusky bearing plant at 100% capacity, 24 / 7 / 365, and still couldn't keep up .. we manufactured tens of thousands of large tapered units to fill in GM's production holes, but they never let anyone else fill in with their integral ball bearing units; that was always considered proprietary technology.
I really can't comment on somebody else's engineering vis-a-vis those 513009's, however. We'd need to know the bearings used, roller angle, backface, geometry, offset, fitup, and a thousand other things to punch into the engineering calculations to see if it will work at all, and if the result is better or worse than the alternatives. The 513009 is known for having a long in-service life, but that's almost entirely due to it being an unstressed rear wheel bearing in a front-drive application. They're just along for the ride. The 513009 was originally made as a tapered roller bearing just so the alignment and runout specs would work for the chassis. Ball bearings hubs vs. roller bearing hubs have different tracking characteristics going down the road, so GM probably wanted to avoid the shopping cart driving style for its upscale FWD land cruisers.
As far as why the 88 Fiero hub had ball bearings is a combination of reasons (if I remember the GM people correctly). First, GM was very concerned about corporate fuel mileage. Ball bearing hub units get better fuel economy than tapers. Second, the Sandusky plant was set up to manufacture ball bearing hub units with raceways integrally ground into the inner and outer forgings. You can't do that with tapers, so converting the hubs to use tapers would have been expensive and taken it out of their preferred production facility; the Fiero was a low-volume niche car that wasn't going to get that golden ticket. Finally, the envelope dimensions of the 88 hub are unique, and the tapered roller bearings in there would have to be much smaller, potentially giving the customer bearings that were more robust on the one hand yet failed after too few miles ... in other words, the tapers would have handled more load, but worn out faster. The decision from GM's point of view was, ball bearings gave better mileage, longer life, and fit in their existing production, at some potential expense of load-carrying capability -- and even that is somewhat misleading because the bearings' load-carrying capabity was already compromised by the hub's packaging issues and inherent geometry.
Rodney mentioned earlier that all the OEM bearings were made by one company, which is long since gone. I suppose in one way that might be true, but it's really not. GM manufactured the Fiero hub units at its giant wheel bearing plant in Sandusky, Ohio. GM simply stopped making the Fiero hubs because it didn't have ANY excess production capacity at Sandusky to devote any of it to a discontinued chassis. When the Fiero was killed, hub production stopped ... only a very few extras were ever produced. Sandusky later became part of the Delphi spin-off, and when Delphi went bankrupt, Sandusky was eventually sold off to Kyklos. The plant has never stopped making hub assemblies since 1980 or so, although it also makes some other parts. The Sandusky plant has one of GM's most interesting histories, dating back to WWII. It was located there so as to be central to much wartime manufacturing, out of range of German bombers, and on the water so raw materials and bearings could be shipped in ro out by rail, land, sea (lake), or air as needed.
