WHERE CAN I FIND BEARINGS FOR MY OLDER MOUTAIN BIKES?

Q: How can I get new bearings and bushings for my Titus FTM aluminum frame’s (2009 model) pivots? I also have a few other USA-made MTB frames (model years 2004–2011), like an Intense Tracer 29 and a Titus MotoLite. I live in Finland, and Mountain Bike Action’s paper magazine is my favorite atlas. Respects for Richard J. Cunningham and Jim McIlvain. Grateful for your reply.

Kari Janiksela

Finland

A: New bearings on old bikes are always a challenge to find whether the brand stopped supporting that platform or the company changed hands. That said, if they are still in business, we will always look to the original bike manufacturer first to see if they have a bike archive or a service e-mail address. Sometimes companies have a residual stockpile of old spare parts that didn’t get cleaned out and you can get lucky. Most of the time, however, we’re left to find the parts on our own. We’re not sure how it looks in Finland, but here in the U.S. we have plenty of bearing options. Bike shops have access to entire bearing libraries courtesy of large-scale distributors like BTI (Bicycle Technologies International) and QBP (Quality Bicycle Products). You can actually peruse BTI’s inventory and get part numbers of items before going into a bike shop to order the parts.

The most popularly used bearing brand is Enduro Bearings, which has a massive selection of bearings of all varieties. Most full-suspension bikes are made using sealed cartridge bearings for pivot rotation. These bearings are normally fairly easy to identify with the numbers on the seals on each side of the bearing, for example, bearing number 6000. This bearing, based on BTI’s information, will fit Trek and Devinci suspension pivots, but it’s likely to fit more than that. This bearing has certain dimensions associated with it, so you can be sure it’s the right one by measuring the internal diameter, outer diameter and width, which in this case are 10x26x8. To learn more about your bike’s bearings check out our feature story on bike bearings.