[Closed] £250 for a rear triangle bearing replacement?

That is a rip off. My old pitch had 16 bearings and that never cost more than £60 to replace them all- even with decent bearings like SKF! Get the manual so you know the sizes and buy them off eBay or Google. Just make sure you get the rubber sealed versions- labelled as 2RS.

We'd charge around £60 for the enduro style bearings and £30-50 labour As the remedy would need all the parts & cables taken off especially with the ADP set up and then replaced then the gears set up again. They must be pretty awesome bearings for that price

If you know the bearing sizes any bearing supplier can get them as there are no weird sizes

http://www.wychbearings.co.uk and buy the relevant kits  http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/mobile/rapidracerproducts-bearing-kit/rp-prod57887

Wych bearings are good & the owner has a wicked ford mustang

£250 is insane for the job. Find a better shop for next time you need one...

Great thanks guys, looks like I'm not just be a tight a**e then and these guys are quoting way above the odds. I've been watching Doddy on GBMN and it doesn't look like too tricky a job, I've build wheels before so I am sure I can do this and save a few quid.

Am I right that I don't even need to buy a bike specific kit? I can just look at the numbers on the bearings and then buy them from a standard bearing supplier like Wych?

Yeah I wouldn’t bother with a kit, the ones I’ve seen on eBay at least we’re poor quality bearings for twice the price for people who don’t know what sizes they need.

The official Trek bearing kits are expensive (at least they were for my old Fuel Ex8, 5 years ago). If it's the official bearings then the price might not be so unreasonable.

That said, third party bearings seem to be much, much cheaper.

The official Trek bearing kits are expensive (at least they were for my old Fuel Ex8, 5 years ago). If it’s the official bearings then the price might not be so unreasonable.

Yes. This might be the case.

And pretty sad so:

bike is 3 years old

bearings in the rear triangle are heavily worn

Quite often "water/moisture" is the issue with those bearings. Not really "worn" - but once flooded with water and they start rusting. "Full" grease filling might help.

Rear triangle bearings: the bike manufacturers still try to find a good and more rugged solution. Difficult issue.

3 years is good from a set of bearings, as said above, its corrosion and grit that get them.

That's stupid money, however, if you don't know what you're doing, get a set of bearing tools, try to avoid hammering them in with punches or sockets. Always worth packing pivot bearings too, I'm of the opinion that you can't overpack any bearing on a bike.

Get the bike back and have a look at the bearings yourself in the first instance.

They can be surprisingly shit, especially the little chainstay ones.

I’d expect to pay circa £100 via the LBS route.

Worn bearings don't necessarily creak.

And you can easily check if they are worn .

Yeah, we aren’t sure what’s creaking but it’s driving us mad on rides - not £250 worth of mad mind!

Two things that come to mind are that possibly the shop have been the way of the irritating creak that took far longer to find than expected recently and have priced best part of a day's workshop time accordingly.

The other possibility is that it's not a price that is expected to be accepted and they don't really want the job for some reason (the usual description would trip the swear filter).

Yeah I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they don’t want the job so have quoted a silly price.

I'd name and shame them.

I’d name and shame them.

Nothing to shame them for .

I would perhaps ask them for a breakdown of how they got that price  . From memory I think that the Trek bearing kits are £60-£70 and if they have quoted for 3 hours labour at £40 per hour plus VAT then they are still £40 OTT .

So funny thing, I put my rear wheel in at the same time to fix some play in it (I don't have the spanners to do it myself) and when I picked that up the receipt also had everything on it for my wife's bike. The guy said to ignore most of it, it was just parts they had ordered in preparation and had to tie it to a works number and that most would get taken off. he also said I wouldn't be charged this I authorise the work. This was a week ago, it was yesterday they rang to say that it actually would be the full £250.

So, I found the receipt, see below how they get to £250. Oh and fixing my rear wheel came to £35.98. I won't name and shame the store.

  https://imgur.com/a/0AVI8uN

Prob looking at 3 to 4 hours labour so at £40 x 4 is £160 plus parts, so not going to be to far out.

Nothing to shame them for .

Except their exuberant prices.

"Except their exuberant prices."

Yours outraged of England.

The detailed reciept is much more telling than the original post.

Yours outraged of England.

How insulting!

We'd be looking at roughly £60 parts, and £80 labour to replace all of the bearings, but quite often there's plenty more requires doing that bumps the price up a bit further, such as the £60 silver service on your quote. Assuming you're doing it yourself, i'd take a close look at the main pivot bolt, and rocker arm pivot bolt, they have been known to crack, and are often dry, leading to creaks.

The detailed reciept is much more telling than the original post.

Does it make it seems less crazy expensive? Still high compared to what previous replies have said. Looks like about £100 on labour and then £140 ish on bearings.

Looks like Trek RRP on the frame bearings, a BB and 2.5 hours labour at £40/hour. Trek mark up standard bearings, so cheaper elsewhere most of the time. Even cheaper if you go for no brand bearings online. There are a couple of double wide bearings on some Treks which seem to be about £20 most places last time I checked.

We used to find buying Enduro bearings from Trek would be £90, from Extra £60, or the customer could bring in a bearing kit they bought online for £30-£40.

I would estimate at hourly rate (£45/hour), estimated minimum charge 2 hours, can easily become 3 hours with a couple of seized pivots, damaged bearings etc. (some bikes like SC are much quicker as you can pull the links out but leave the bike intact, Trek you are stripping the back end off the bike)

Also may need bolts/spacers etc replaced if damaged.

I was gonna put surrey Rene but I realised no one needs to be that insulted .

On the contrary to the original post and RD's comment about doing the job for 30 quid (LOL), all I can see is how mechanics get paid eff all and one of the reasons for shops closing left right and center.

No real idea on cost of living in the UK any more or what a 'silver service' entails, but only 40 UKP to replace all the bearings and potentially deal with seized axles, exploding bearings that have been in the frame for three years seems stupidly cheap if a shop actually wants to make any money (which despite the moaning, they are perfectly entitled to do if you want them to exist). I assume the labour for setting up the shifting / rear brake again is covered under the service but where is the labour charge for the rear hub overhaul and BB replacement?

IME, £250 is way, way expensive, but bearing maintenance is pretty labour intensive and always a more expensive job than you think if you're paying someone else to do it. If the bike has never been touched, seized fixings can be a real problem and easily double the time taken to complete.

I've just finished a routine service on an Intense Carbine SL and that ended up needing the 4 upper bearings (Enduro Max sourced from the distributor - £4 each) and I would estimate that it took around 1 hour to replace just these, but I also cleaned out and serviced the lower link bearings as well as inspecting the link axles and other bushings (and a good clean of the muck jammed in the gaps in the frame!) - this probably took the whole job to around 3 hours as it needed the whole frame stripping down. This also includes greasing up the new bearings to extend their life - a worthwhile task! The bike is getting a new groupset, so was in bits anyway, but this estimate is based on just doing the frame linkage.

I'm pretty anal about this sort of thing so probably take longer than a shop would, but I also know that I've done a good job and the bike won't come back to me. I'm also not charging labour to the person who owns the bike 😉 On the plus side, it all came apart nicely...mostly because I greased it all up when it was put together last year after the last linkage service 😉

It's a lot, but IIRC the kit for my Pitch was £110 and not too dissimilar a layout so £120 might be correct for the parts. The proper kits often include a new set of bolts and spacers as they're often alloy and strip/corrode or just get damaged in removal. And I'm guessing that £250 includes some bontrager hub parts, is that not your wheel? So it's £249 - £16 of hub parts, and the labour for that = £215, -£120 in parts makes that £95 to strip and replace every bearing, and do the gears and brake. TBH given the PITA some bearings can be I wouldn't do it for £95.

The bike is 3 years old, does about 200 miles per year tops and my wife weighs like 9 stone so isn’t exactly testing the bike, I really don’t see how the bearing can be “heavily worn”

TBH I find it's damp and inactivity that kills bearings, I can run a slightly rough BB all winter and it be fine, then I leave it for a week in Spring and it shits it's guts all over the floor.

Like most bike things if youre cash rich and time poor get a shop to do it. If Your cash poor but have time then DIY.  If you're just poor then get a hardtail 😉

Even with the real + bodge tools I use, it’s an hour to an hour and a half max to change a set of frame bearings.

bike in the stand

rear wheel off

work through the various bearings

something ridiculous like an Evil might take a while but of all the jobs I do on a bike, frame bearings are at the easier and quicker end of the scale

I get bearings from kinetics. They come in a set all the ones you need and are decent quality.

https://www.kineticbikebearings.com/catalogsearch/result/?cat=&q=Trek+remedy+7

For those wondering, my wheel was a separate job on its own section of the receipt, I have shown just what was for my wife’s bike.

I rang my old bike shop today and got their input and the mechanic burst out laughing when I said what they had quoted. He said to pop it over to him when I am next in the area and he’d do it for a fraction of the cost, he’s familiar with the condition of the bike as well so he not assuming pristine condition.

any one local to wirral able to replace pivot bearings in a specialized FSR comp mtb

But its not a £250 bill just to replace the bearings is it?

There is £100 of labour. 40 misc and £60 silver service. So they will do the other parts of whatever their silver service entails or they won't and the labour charge will come down to reflect that.

There is a bbkt on there too, presumably some labour in whatever form for that.

Bontrager hub parts on there. Its tricky to see what all the individual parts are as there is not enough of a description to tell.

So it's not £250 for just replacing the bearings as there is other work going on on the face of it.

Would like to hear the shops explanation of the work they are carrying out. Its either more than just the bearings or they have added the service on by accident?

If it's anything like my bike, it's always the bearing above the BB that need replacing. The others just need a clean and re packing with grease.

Have a look first before buying a full set.