What are the spacers inside wheels for?
 

I just spent a relaxing 20 minutes mullering the old bearings out of my spare rear wheel today, and I got to wondering what the spacer in the wheel actually does, apart from making it hard to knock the bearings out... It's not weight bearing, it's not tightly fitted, it doesn't rotate with the wheel... But it must do something, right?

It stops your bearings from collapsing inwards should they fail.

If my bearings fail that severely would that not be about the last of my worries? :)

If you had no spacer and the bearing failed you'd deffo lose control. The way it is now, all you'll have to do is control a serious emergency stop :lol:

when you tighten the wheel spindle it clamps up the bearing inner races against the spacer so everything is held tight without putting load through the bearings themselves.

This allows the bearings to spin freely while only having to carry the load from the weight of the bike.

Without the spacer the bearings would be taking the full clamping load of the spindle through the running surfaces and ball bearings, probably several tons load, which would destroy them PDQ. :wink:

Nicely put Embee. :D

i knew that from my skateboarding days.

One of the MiniTwins racers forgot the centre spacer when he rebuilt his wheels a couple of years back.

Aside from wrecking both bearings, making a mess of the axle and almost chucking him off at every corner he didn't have too many problems. :D

It's not an axle, it's a spindle, an axle has at least one wheel at each end :wink: :lol: :lol:










I know this because my brother-in-law got charged £6 for using the M6 toll road on his Goldwing with trailer as, aparently it was classed as having 2 axles AND pulling a trailer :shock: :lol: :lol:

Ah hah! I'd notice it's slightly loose when the wheel's off but obviously with the spindle tightened it'd compress. Well, that's another thing I don't know off the list :)