I am talking about using an OTS bearing, hell it doesn't even have to be ceramic. There are stronger steel bearings that are also cheaper than our stock units. There are countless standardized wheel bearings available from all the big name bearing manufacturers. And the only thing required to make that work is a bearing housing.

If the goal is to have a wheel bearing option that won't fail nearly as often and will be available basically indefinitely then using a standardized bearing makes the most sense to me. Reconfiguring a significant amount of parts and then struggling to get axles because DSS sucks at making things correctly half the time, just to use wheel bearings from another vehicle that aren't any less expensive than our OEM bearing doesn't make much sense to me.



And I agree with Dallas, every platform has it's catch(es). Look at how popular and loved the S2000 is, yet people rarely talk about how it's not uncommon that their control arms and uprights snap if you hit track curbing hard enough, or how their control arm mounts on the chassis rip off from extended track use, or how you literally have to replace the front brake rotors every single track day because they crack insanely easily (okay plenty of people talk about the last one lol). Or with BMW stuff how rod bearings are basically a consumable every few years, and I'm not just talking about older stuff, this still applies to the turbo stuff too, N54s and N55s go through rod bearings as quickly as S54s do and I would be inclined to put money on the same being true for the B58 as well. On older BMW chassis they basically have to be seam welded all over the entire rear end or the chassis cracks apart. I don't even need to explain what goes wrong with Subaru stuff. Hell even 996 Porsches are known to have common issues with freeze plugs leaking and requiring the engine to be pulled to fix it.

It doesn't matter how you skin it, if you want to go fast around a racetrack and you don't have at least 100 grand for a car, you're going to have obstacles that need to be addressed, unless you're buying a vehicle without a VIN.

 

I'm not saying any car is exempt from its quirks and failures. I'm saying I don't want to have to order custom parts any time something goes wrong.
I.E. in my Honda days, we had a steady stream of lifetime warranty axles from AutoZone

silly example, but you get the idea lol

 

I'm right there with you. Having to order custom parts in the event something breaks is definitely one of the biggest headaches to deal with on a car. And that's exactly what I'm hoping to avoid.


Edit: Found the specs on the factory rear bearing, including load rating. Also found a potential replacement bearing that will work with the factory hub which has a load rating 22% higher than the factory bearing. I think it would fit in a machined housing as well, just need to measure up some stuff to confirm it fits in the space. Quick google search shows prices in the $30-60 range for the uprated bearing.

 

Damn I want to go to bed but I really wanted to get to the bottom of this and I think I have.

So, the OEM bearing manufacturer is NTN, which isn't a big surprise. I was able to find all their published info on our rear bearing. The part number they list I was able to find stamped on a few other bearing manufacturer part pictures which confirmed the source for me along with some of the dimensions which I measured.

The bearing uses a 40mm ID for the hub to press through, and they also list a lot of bearings that aren't integral to housings. One of those has the same width as the factory bearing and the same 40mm ID but with a 22% higher load rating. I did some tracing to find what vehicles use that uprated bearing and funny enough, one of the applications listed is the front wheel bearing for the standard lancer lol.

Based on what I've measured and the dimensions they list, the front lancer bearing should be able to be used in our rears with a housing made to accept them. This would give us 22% stronger bearings while being able to retain factory hubs and axles.

The cherry on top is private label NTN bearings can be bought on Rockauto for $16!

I really need to sleep now but tomorrow I'll see if there's a similar possibility for uprated front bearings as well.

 

Not including ARP studs

 

Figure this out before i spend $1k on stock hubs

 

this would be one of those awesomely brilliant mods that would be named after you

 

There's a few reasons why this isn't a good path for someone like me to do, but could make perfect sense for you. With this you need the $200 stock bearing to then take apart and rebuild with a new bearing. The bearing isn't the cost, it will be the mods to the stock assembly and perhaps the cost of machining a full new carrier. By the end of making it, you'll be $300-400 and you can see what Curt Browns ceramics ended up so expensive.

For me, it doesn't enable any sales of the things I care about or using 1 feature to drive the sales to new people that "must" have that upgrade. All a business decision there. If I can make an optional upright body and DSS supply an axle end that is a non-wear item and then the consumable is OTS, that makes more sense to me. More money up front but other benefits to justify. At the end of the day, I gotta make money to buy more tools/toys . (I have never kept profits for anything SSB, every dollar made has gone back into SSB)

 

I don't know why you think the OEM bearing has to be purchased? This would be an entire new bearing housing, the only thing getting reused would be the hub that the axle splines into. And even if you just wanted to modify a stock bearing housing to accept the lancer front bearing (which sounds like more of a hassle honestly), you can get $20 housings off Rockauto if that was the desired route.

I agree that new housings would likely carry some amount of expense, but the key here is the housing is a buy once deal and then you have cheaper, stronger, more available consumables in the future. Doing wheel bearings would just be a matter of changing out the bearing cartridge in the housing.

I don't know what your experience is like with DSS but over half of my firsthand experience with them is getting stuff that doesn't even come close to fitting, or waiting 6 months for them to make something that's supposed to be an OTS part, so I can't see it being any better for something custom. Also, I can't see an axle not being a consumable, they'll always have to be rebuilt at some point, and not only that but on the chance one does break now your hands are tied on hoping that DSS will still make you another one.

I am a big proponent to backwards compatibility with products. Customers are more likely to buy more things if they can upgrade in steps, rather than be forced to buy a bunch of stuff at once because it only works with itself. I'm open to working on this with you if you're open to it. My pipeline for Wunderladen stuff going to the machine shop is pretty full at the moment so I likely wouldn't be able to offer these until the spring of next year if I go through my shop.

 

Just to get my point across clearly here and make sure we're using the same nomenclature. What I'm proposing is reusing the hub, and replacing the bearing housing w/integral bearing with a billet bearing housing that accepts the replaceable front lancer bearing. Customer would reuse their hubs, there's not point in selling new ones, our rear hubs are insanely overbuilt. Basically all that'd be getting sold is the billet bearing housing with the lancer bearing.

 

Certainly two fundamentally different approaches. Both are hinged on someone else machining a critical component that could be one day irreplaceable. I suppose with your approach theres always just going back to OEM. With your bearing housing machining, you might be under estimating the cost to machine that part and make a profit on it. To start its going to need to be a high quality steel like 4140 or 4340. It will probably need to be machined in a normalized temper to start with near net on the bearing surfaces, then get hardened to RC35+. After heat treat, then bearing and seating surfaces would be turned and at a high tolerance for press fit. Then maybe some sort of passivation or plating to protect it which would require masking.

These made in china bearings that are vertically integrated with all these steps in-house can be done in volume and its NBD. For privateers making low volumes you get low volume pricing on every step.

Just going to guess through some numbers, but If you fronted enough money to manufacture a large enough batch (Greater than say 25), then you might get that part under $200. Even if it was $200 cost, add in typical 30% margin (if you don't make any profit then there's no point), and you're at $260. Now there's bearing plus assembly and pressing these apart isnt trivial, though if you have a process developed it may go fast. So you're at $300-$325 depending what you pay for labor. Say a batch of 30 was done and 200 per housing, You'd be 6k initial investment not including the preproduction prototypes and validation, and whatever bearings/hubs cost so all 30 can be done at once unless the plan would be to modify customers OEM parts. And that 30% margin and some labor rate, it'd be maybe $1800-$2700 in profit.

Maybe its worth it, maybe not. But its certainly not easy and mistakes along the way will eat into that profit quick.

 

Added caveat: I would pay $300-400 for a rebuilt rear bearing if it lasted 2-3x as long on track. It would have to be proven of course, but while they aren't hard to change its certainly still a hassle.

 

Yea, the one thing I'm unsure of is material. I'm not sure if steel is necessary for the housing. I'm wondering if it'd be possible to do it out of 7075. The job of the housing is just to keep the bearing located to the upright. In a sense you could just think of it as an extension of the upright. I have a hard time believe the OEM bearing is made out of anything more exotic than a mild steel. The evo and the normal lancer share the same rear bearings so there's no way Mitsu would splurge that much money on exotic bearings for standard lancers.

And the failures we see on track are of the ball bearings and races, not the housing. So I don't think we need to go crazy overboard on the housings with this, as long as it can safely keep the bearing located it should be sufficient.

I definitely have a lot of thinking to do with this but I'll likely order up a front lancer bearing here soon and start measuring for a housing.

 

Its really the surface finish on the bearings that makes me think theirs some amount of chromoly in them. Plain carbon steel just isn't that shiny nor hold that shine as long as the parts I have that have been sitting around for years with only minor surface rust forming.

As for why the bearings fail, I think its the flex of the housing itself allowing the bearing to take excessive load, Its why we also over torque the axles to keep the bearing seated as firmly as possible. I absolutely would not be on board with trying to switch that to aluminum. The GTR bearing doesn't use the axle to clamp it, its heated and pressed together but also no way it can come apart. The Porsche bearing I have here looks like it used two bearings, front and rear of the housing and the axle just keeps the bearing seated. That tolerance on the axle would be critical to hold the bearing but not load it I'm guessing.

 

Well as someone living in the "rust belt" of the midwest I can pretty confidently say my wheel bearings are the most rusty thing on my car. Black oxide bolts rust just from sitting in the garage here. I'm not saying it's impossible the factory housings have some amount of chromoly but it'd really surprise me.

One of the important things to note about the factory bearing is the outer races are integral to the housing. If the races are flexing the bearing will fail, yes. If the races are no longer part of the housing then that's not an issue anymore, which is exactly what the 2 piece design would do, along with having a better contact angle, which is what makes them have a higher load rating. There are definitely some cars that use aluminum uprights with press in bearing cartridges and I don't see this being really any different than those applications. I'm fine with making the housing from steel but I don't think it'll need to be that intensive of a process. When you start with a superior base alloy you don't need to worry about going through lots of post processing, heat treating, etc. which is where costs can really balloon for small part amounts.

In regards to the GTR bearing, yes it's a swaged design. The preload is fixed and cannot be changed. When we make our axle nuts tighter we are increasing bearing preload, sometimes it's good to be able to control that. As for the Porsche bearing, I'm not familiar with those at all but most wheel bearings are dual row ball bearing if that's what you're referring to and realistically it's all that's needed as long as the contact angles are good which gives a greater surface area for transferring load resulting in less flex.

Here's the cross section of our factory rear bearing: