F658GS Steering Head Bearings

Inspired by CycleRob, this section is devoted to all flavors of the F800.

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Boxer
Lifer
Posts: 3398
Joined: Fri Mar 18, 2005 9:16 am
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Location: Atmore, Alabama

F658GS Steering Head Bearings

Post by Boxer »

Steering head bearings are done. I headed out Wednesday morning to pickup two bearings at NAPA, only to find out when I got there, that they could only get one. I took a ride to BMW of Atlanta to get another one. They only had one. So I took my Japanese SKF bearing, which cost $27 at NAPA, and my German SKF bearing, which cost $47, along with a new bottom metal ring, which cost $3.89, out to Cyclerob, and together we did the job. Those are the OLD, worn out bearings in the photo. Forgot to take a picture of the new bearings.
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The two bearings were identical, BTW, except for one had Germany stamped into the edge of the outer race, and the other had Japan stamped there.
The old bottom outer race was much worse than the top one, and we had a little trouble grinding down a metal punch to reach down into those two holes, but that was the biggest problem of the whole job. The outer races hammered into the stem nicely after freezing them for about an hour while disassembled everything.

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The inner stem coming up from the bottom tree has a very minutely smaller circumference at the top than at the bottom, so the bearing on the bottom had to be hammerd down to get it off, but it just slid fairly easily past the top wider portion.

Cleaned out the frame neck, put a little grease on the surfaces, heated the stem top and bottom slightly, and tapped those frozen outer races in very easily.
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And here is a photo of me wondering how long it's going to take Rob to knock that bearing off. [;)]

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Whole job, including lunch andplaying with new puppy took us a leisurely, and educational 3 hours.
Hope this helps someone else. My front end began to feel wonky at about 32,000 miles, but by the time I made it to Rob's house it was fearfully stuck in the middle at slow speeds. It felt like a magnet was pulling it to the middle.

Oh, Rob, the pinch clamp on thr front axel was fine. Thanks for worrying. ;-)
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