Author Topic: Should I replace the original grease on NOS Campagnolo hubs from 2001?  (Read 4617 times)

Hi - I recently picked up a nice set of NOS Campagnolo Chorus hubs, originally from 2001 - is it likely that the original grease has degraded/dried out and should I replace this before using them? I assume this is a fairly straightforward job? The hubs are for 10 speed, 32 hole rims.

Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
Yes.  Old grease turns into waxy gunge and I imagine it's mostly the soap matrix by that stage.
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Samuel D

It does? I once opened a Czechoslovakian water pump that had been stored in its original box (wood with hay packaging) for several decades. The grease looked and felt like new.

Whether there was ever enough grease in these Campagnolo hubs is another matter. Only one way to find out!

Nice hubs.

I'll have a look at the little instruction booklet that game with them to see what's involved. BTW the hubs are surprising light, about 380g the pair (excluding skewers).
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

I think it depends on the type of grease as to how much the oil seeps out of the base, but in general I'd not assume that new hubs were set up with enough grease; you're going to have to adjust them anyway once they're built up, so you might as well strip and re-lube now.

yes, of course you should replace (or at least top up) the grease. It is unlikely that the bearings will be at direct risk of iminent failure, but dried grease quickly tears the seal lips to pieces, which then leaves the hubs more vulnerable to the weather.

cheers

yes, of course you should replace (or at least top up) the grease. It is unlikely that the bearings will be at direct risk of iminent failure, but dried grease quickly tears the seal lips to pieces, which then leaves the hubs more vulnerable to the weather.

Okay, should it be enough to just scoop what's left of the old grease out e.g. with cotton buds, and replace, or should I try to clean the races fully (e.g. with degreaser?) before replacing the grease?
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

since hubs with half-decent seals run better in SFG, you could just add some synthetic gear oil to what is there already (which should at least be clean even if it is a bit dry) and run them like that for a while.  The resultant mixture should keep the seal lips well wetted.

cheers

Don't forget that the original grease will have had holes drilled in it if they are genuine Campag. hubs.

Don't forget that the original grease will have had holes drilled in it if they are genuine Campag. hubs.

How's that?
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

ElyDave

  • Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society member 263583
To make it lighter :thumbsup:
“Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” –Charles Dickens

To make it lighter :thumbsup:

Drillium grease? :facepalm:

Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
I'm surprised they've never invented their own mysterious and expensive material called Tullium.  In reality it would be monkey metal, but marketing.
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Okay, I realise I might be opening a rather large can of worms here, but what grease available currently would people recommend for Campagnolo loose-bearing hubs?

Campagnolo recommend their own LB-100 grease, though that doesn't seem to be available anymore. Apparently it was just re-badged Kluber Isoflex Topas NB52 grease, which you can buy, but looks hideously expensive (e.g. £100 for 400g) and only available in much larger quantities than I really need. It's apparently "based on a synthetic hydrocarbon oil and a barium complex soap" and Campagnolo do seem to specifically recommend a synthetic, rather than mineral oil-based grease - is there anything similar, but cheaper?

There's Phil Wood bearing grease, which many seem to love, but I understand that's quite a bit thicker the the Campag/Kluber greaseand I've no idea what it's made of.

I have read some older posts here and elsewhere that suggest other greases for use with hub bearings, such as Mobilith SHC 1500 (which only seems to be available in enormous quantities),  Mobil XHP 222 (cheap and readily available, but smells very bad), Mobil SHCPM 460 (has an NLGI rating of 1.5, most std greases are 2 - don't know if that's a pro or a con, though), Morris K99 (mineral-based), Rock N Roll Super Web Grease, Shimano Dura Ace grease, Finish Line Teflon grease, blue boat trailer grease, and even Vaseline(!)

Are any of these particularly recommend (or to be avoided)? The bike in question will not see winter use, nor will it be an all-weathers commuter. Thanks!
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

I always used Castrol LM. My friendly local bike shop has some strange red stuff, but I don't know what it is. Neither is much help to you though - hopefully some qualified grease monkey will come along and enlighten us all. :)

Way back my Father, who was in the lubricants business, put a sample of Campag white grease through the lab. The verdict was that it was standard white water pump grease. I sold several large barrels to a company that packaged it in small pots and sold it for cycle use. The empty pots were worth many times what the grease was!

Maybe Campag has gone to something more hi-tech in recent years.

I always used Castrol LM. My friendly local bike shop has some strange red stuff, but I don't know what it is. Neither is much help to you though - hopefully some qualified grease monkey will come along and enlighten us all. :)

Following on from my earlier post. The red(jelly-like) grease is probably similar to what my Father suggested that Iused in bike bearings. That was particularly aimed at the joints in track-layers working in extreme conditions at lowish revs, and was waterproof.

I would add that my Father was a Rolls Royce trained highly qualified aero and mechanical engineer who then went to a very specialist lubricants company - Concorde and TSR2 fluids etc. He regarded my bike bits as quaintly primitive!

I would recommend finish line 'teflon' grease. It has a synthetic base oil with a higher viscosity than most other greases, and it provides a considerable amount of protection to good quality bearings.  Being white, you can see immediately if it is contaminated in any way, so it is good for posh parts that you do bother to at least look at once or twice a year.

I'd only mark it down for a few aspects

1) it doesn't contain a solid lubricant (like MoS2) which will withstand  the worst conditions in a bearing. [arguably it doesn't need to, inside campag hubs etc]

2) it doesn't keep seal lips perfectly well wetted (which it has in common with most #2 greases)

3) it doesn't have enough corrosion inhibitors to a) prevent further corrosion in bearings that have started to corrode or b) to withstand the very worst effects of winter road salt. [By which I mean it is vastly better than most other greases, just not as good as a very few others in these respects]

So there are better greases in some aspects, but 1) and 3) don't apply to your typical campag hubs and if you add a little synthetic gear oil to it (or indeed most dried and/or excessively thick #2 greases) you will make a kind of in situ SFG that will work very well in hubs that have half-decent lip seals.


Similar considerations apply to the campag grease that is inside your hubs already, hence my earlier suggestion f adding some gear oil to the grease that is inside your NOS hubs.


FWIW I use a very basic grease  like LM (which is designed for a completely different load/speed regime) as a 'running in' grease; a few hundred miles use with that in will knock the high spots off a rough bearing surface (this is another way of saying that the bearing will wear at a noticeably higher rate with this grease in) and then I will put in something decent instead.

FWIW I have used SPD pedal bearings to experiment with different greases over the last few years. These pedals have bearings that will suffer 'avalanche' wear, (if they wear at all) in which the (very high in relation to the ball size)  loads are dramatically less well shared between balls as soon as there is the slightest free play, so small differences in initial wear rate rapidly become exaggerated. They also (for whatever reason) have bearing surfaces that will 'recover' from having had ~100um wear, and will work happily again (with the right adjustment/ grease in).  Finally it takes just a few minutes to purge the old grease with fresh stuff and to adjust the pedal bearings again ready for the next experiment.

  In relation to this discussion, there are greases that provide a lower wear rate in an already damaged bearing, but in a correctly adjusted bearing that is in good condition, the wear rate with FL Teflon grease is very low; new bearings in cheap SPD models (e.g. PD-515 and PD-520) have surfaces that are not perfectly smooth; normally they 'run in' in a few hundred miles but with the FL grease inside, this process takes far longer than normal.  My experience is that once the bearings are run in nicely, and packed with FL Teflon grease you might (barring gross water ingress) expect them to last several years of daily use without requiring further adjustment, provided the grease is purged and replaced once a year or so. With a lot of other greases this does not happen; the bearings just keep on wearing away.

FWIW the way greases behave in bicycle bearings is complicated and is (even now) not perfectly well understood in comparable low-speed high load applications.  I attempted to explain some of these things in a few posts I put on the cyclingUK (formerly CTC) forum a while ago.  It is perhaps interesting reading for some, if only to illustrate what a complicated business it really is.

FWIW in those particular campag hubs, the loadings in correctly adjsuted hubs are quite benign apart from the RH hubshell bearing; this (bascially, arguably) has the wrong contact angle in it; ideally it should be varied with the radial loading if there is a pair of bearings supporting a hubshell, and it isn't. Even when carefully adjusted and reasonably well lubricated, this bearing wears; the balls in the RH bearing will tend to scuff under high loads. This may be lessened with a little more preload; I have yet to find the best adjustment but it might be ~1/40th of a turn more than is required to eliminate free play from the bearing, something like that. Obviously you want the best possible grease in this bearing, and to replace it regularly.


cheers

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
I would stuff in more of what's already there to save stripping it down.  Otherwise, Phil Wood.
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

I would stuff in more of what's already there to save stripping it down.  Otherwise, Phil Wood.

What's in there already will be Campagnolo LB-100 grease (discontinued), which AFAIK is actually Kluber Isoflex Topas NB52 grease, which is very expensive and seemingly only available in 400g quantities are larger in the UK - wouldn't be so bad if you could buy it in a 50g tube here.

Phil Wood grease AFAIK is petroleum-based grease, whereas Campagnolo specifically state to use synthetic grease, though I don't know if it makes much difference in practice (I theory I guess synthetic grease will vary less in viscosity as temperatures change)
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

I would recommend finish line 'teflon' grease. It has a synthetic base oil with a higher viscosity than most other greases, and it provides a considerable amount of protection to good quality bearings.  Being white, you can see immediately if it is contaminated in any way, so it is good for posh parts that you do bother to at least look at once or twice a year.

I'd only mark it down for a few aspects

1) it doesn't contain a solid lubricant (like MoS2) which will withstand  the worst conditions in a bearing. [arguably it doesn't need to, inside campag hubs etc]

2) it doesn't keep seal lips perfectly well wetted (which it has in common with most #2 greases)

3) it doesn't have enough corrosion inhibitors to a) prevent further corrosion in bearings that have started to corrode or b) to withstand the very worst effects of winter road salt. [By which I mean it is vastly better than most other greases, just not as good as a very few others in these respects]

So there are better greases in some aspects, but 1) and 3) don't apply to your typical campag hubs and if you add a little synthetic gear oil to it (or indeed most dried and/or excessively thick #2 greases) you will make a kind of in situ SFG that will work very well in hubs that have half-decent lip seals.

Thanks, which sort/viscosity of synthetic gear oil to add (there seem to be lots of options) and how much in proportion to the grease? Is there a risk of the two not mixing nicely together?
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

you will be able to buy ~90W synthetic gear oil fairly easily. If you can find more viscous oil than that, great, but I don't think you will find it so easily in small quantities. There is a theoretical risk that there will be some problem with the mixing, but for whatever reason I have not seen it happen as yet. Depending on how runny you like your mixture, between 1/3 oil and 2/3rds oil would be about right.

Because the seal on the RH  rear hub bearing is not so crucial in this design and the grease needs to be as good as possible in that bearing. I'd suggest that you can leave the grease 'full fat' within the RH hub  bearing itself.

cheers

you will be able to buy ~90W synthetic gear oil fairly easily. If you can find more viscous oil than that, great, but I don't think you will find it so easily in small quantities. There is a theoretical risk that there will be some problem with the mixing, but for whatever reason I have not seen it happen as yet. Depending on how runny you like your mixture, between 1/3 oil and 2/3rds oil would be about right.

Thanks I can't find any fully Synthetic SAE 90W gear oil, it's mostly all 75W-90, there seems to be some 80W-140 available, but only in bulk quantities, Is 75w-90 going to do the job, or is it going to be too thin? e.g.

Mobilub 1 SHC 75W-90: https://www.engineoildirect.co.uk/mobilube-1-shc-75w-90-1l

Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway

75-90W oil will be OK, if (as I suspected and you have more or less confirmed) it isn't easy to source thicker stuff.

If you don't mind remote purchase you can buy 1 litre of 140W oil here

https://www.opieoils.co.uk/search/go?w=140W

cheers


75-90W oil will be OK, if (as I suspected and you have more or less confirmed) it isn't easy to source thicker stuff.

If you don't mind remote purchase you can buy 1 litre of 140W oil here

https://www.opieoils.co.uk/search/go?w=140W


As far as I can tell, those all look like mineral oils, not synthetic, though, which may not be so good to mix with synthetic grease?
Old enough to know better, but young enough to do it anyway