Phil Wood Spec'd huh?

I knew my enginerd-nature would pay off some day. I was looking for ideas out there for improving the "spinny-ness" of my Race Face cranks. I popped off the outer plastic (pics to come later), uhem, "seal". That alone helped - what's the point of precision metal surfaces when your bearing to axle interface is a stinking mushy-ass plastic "seal". The bearings are double sealed style anyway! Nice job on the CNC machine work Race Face, but with a few more thoughts on the details you could have squashed the "External Bearing BBs suck" rumblings that now abound.

Anyway, Eric from Monkey Wrench awhile back said he noticed a big improvement after throwing in Phil Wood bearings. And why not, I think just mentioning "Phil Wood" in the vicinity of your bicycle will improve its performance. But I digress.

So I looked up the bearings on their site, 23 bucks for their "Spec'd" bearings. This is where my engineer experience comes in. Many a project for my ME classes relied on the holy grail of industrial equipment: http://www.mcmaster.com/. So I grabbed the Mfg # for the bearing that Phil Wood has spec'd and headed over to mcmaster. Sure enough, that mfg # is the same, and the ID/OD/Width values match exactly. So unless the Phil price is for a pair, I think $12.82 sounds a lot better than $23.00 :)