Puch sealed bearing conversion

At some point over the last year my Newport developed an annoying squeak in the front end. I think it was related to the brakes, because I could partially pull the brake lever and it would go away. I'm not sure why I was so lazy about working on it, but I was. Someone made a comment to me about it the other day and that was enough motivation for me to get it fixed.

When I thought about tearing it apart, I realized I didn't want to deal with the grease and loose ball bearings anymore. I don't have much of a complaint about how they work when they are dialed in, but they are messy and can take some fine tuning to get them adjusted properly.

I read through this wiki on Moped Army before I got started:
Puch Sealed Bearing Conversion Wiki

I ordered my 6001zz bearings through Amazon. I ordered a new 12mm axle through Treats, which came with a bunch of spacers on it. And I ordered my .5mm shim stock from Honest. It's unfortunate how much this conversion costs. It's about $40 per wheel when you add up all of those parts.

Here is how the shim stock showed up.



Here is what my bearings looked like when I took the wheel apart. You can see the sponge from the speedometer housing in there. I wasn't using it anyway, so I eliminated it.



I used my angle grinder with a cutoff wheel to cut the shim stock. That was pretty easy to do.



I think the most difficult part of this was forming the shim stock into enough of a circle to fit it inside the wheel. I initially tried to form it around the bearing itself, but the steel was so springy that it wouldn't hold the shapre. From there I decided to use some needle nose pliers and slowly form the part by hand. That worked out pretty well, but I had to spend a lot of time on it.

Here you can see the bearing and the shim stock in place. You can also see the spacer that is in between the two bearings.



I ended up having to stack a few of the spacers on one side to get the wheel centered. Since I am running Gazelles and a front fender, the centering is very critical.



On the other side I used a spacer under the brake plate and had to use washers on the outside. I plan to make one spacer to take place of those washers and another single spacer to take place of the three I used on the other side.



I haven't had a chance to ride the bike yet, but spinning the wheel on the stand felt nice and solid.

Maybe new forks and a disc brake conversion will be next?