If you enjoy ambiguity and uncertainty, there are few better places to start than fitting a small ball bearing with tight clearance. Just to keep things simple, I’ll use Koyo’s (JTEKT) main Ball & Roller Bearings catalog for the technical information. All full-size bearing catalogs will have the same information.
The place to start when determining fit is with clearance. When dealing with ball bearings, the term “clearance” always means radial internal clearance, whereas when we preload tapered bearings, we are usually talking about axialpreload/endplay (Fig. 1). For your reference, axial clearance is around 10x the distance of radial clearance.
Read More