Webra bearing life report

[Keith Black]

Prompted by Brian's excellent news regarding the new stainless steel bearings available for the Webra 1.45/1.60 I thought I'd share the following info on my Webra bearing life (standard non-stainless steel). 

I keep a log of all flights  including the duration of each flight (rounded to the minute). Last week I went through the arduous task of entering data on about 340 flights into MS Excel. I also keep a log of each bearing change so I was able to compile data on bearing life on over 70 hours of flight time. 

All of my statistics below are reported in hours because flights differ in duration. Also, the decimal points represent a fraction of an hour, not minutes. For example 2.5 would be 2 1/2 hours. 

I currently have three Webra engines, one in each of my two planes and one backup (thanks to the RadioSouth $259 special). I also had one Webra in which the bearings disintegrated and the engine was destroyed. Horizon replaced this engine free of charge (thanks Horizon). I have broken out bearing life times based on each engine. 

Webra 1: 
- Original Bearings: 12 hrs (may be off an hour or so, first runs were not in current aircraft and not logged)
- Bearing 2: 13.22 hrs
- Bearing 3: 9.40 hrs
- Bearing 4: still in engine, 0.67 hrs

Webra 2: 
Original Bearings, 7.85 hrs (bearings disintegrated and destroyed engine)

Webra 3: 
Originals Bearings: 11.38 hrs
Bearing 2: still being used, 6.37 hrs

Webra 4: 
Originals Bearing 9.02 hrs 
Bearing 2: still being used, 2.9 hrs.

As you can see the times for replacement vary between 7.85 hrs and 13.22 hrs. If you take out Webra #2 that suffered the early bearing disintegration then the range is consistently between 9 & 13 hrs. The average being 11 hrs.

I found this quite interesting as it represents a fairly consistent pattern of bearing life.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's results or comments. 

Keith Black
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