Re: Replace wheel bearings for Honda HR214,HR216,HR216 (all alluminum deck ) 8" wheel
The most faked item in the world is bearings, so much so that major manufacturers now pay for leads to sellers of fakes.
There is more to a bearing than the physical dimensions.
Now push mower wheel bearings are not a critical application so any junk bearing that was rejected by the original customer as being defective will probably get you by.
However buying unbranded bearings off ebay from a reseller who does not exist except in cyber space is a bad practice to get into.
Unless you have very expensive equipment you can not tell if the races were ground & polished to the required surface finish or just machined, you can not tell if the races have been hardened to the correct levels.
The same goes for the balls / rollers and then there is the physical number of balls/rollers in the bearings, I had a customer whose "new spindle" bearings failed, destroying the housings, blades and chomping a big hole in the deck.
When I pulled the dust seals off the one intact bearing it had 3 less balls than the NTN's I get from my wholesaler in individual branded boxes.
The bearing shop identified them as low speed low load bearings used in sub standard shopping trolley wheels.
Any bearing that comes loose or cello wrapped as a roll were made for a factory for a specific purpose and using them in any other application can result in failures.
A printed cardboard carton does add to both the cost price & the logistical costs but it does not account for the difference between a $ 20 bearing and a $ 2 bearing.
Salvage / surplus merchants get their hands on these production bearings and ultimately they end up for sale on a phantom web site many of which close down every so often so the owners can remain anonymous and beyond legal reach.
In many cases the owners of these sites live overseas and the only local entity is a bank account used to clear funds so if some one does try to take legal action , there nothing to sue.
The advertisement is also factually wrong, those bearings are not water tight.
Water tight bearings look different , are wider and use a different type of grease.
The good ones have a double lipped sprung metal seals