Nissan 200SX Club - South Africa

look around in your area for automotive engneering place~

The knowledge on here is scary !
A series engine will be designed with what is known as life span replacement components.
Bearings , amongst a myriad of stuff, falls under this category.
There are two methods of sizing bearings. The first is where the factory will manufacture a run of differing sized bearings for a series engine.
These bearings are then checked for size and categorized according to deviation in size.
These shells are then allocated a colour to identify them.If a journal is miked up and a specific size is determined, its a simple matter of selecting the appropriate bearing based on the colour code. Most new engines are now designed this way. When stripping an engine such as this, you will see paint dots or smears on the crankshaft next to the appropriate journals.
Each paint colour determines the journal size and ultimately the bearing shell size.
Chevrolet V8 engines will not have a single same sized bearing shell in it today. Even a brand new Chev V8 engine. from the factory.
Alfa Romeo, Renault, Citroen, BMW etc all have now gone this route.

Renault and Ford actually do not allow for a sub assembly to be overhauled these days.You run a bearing, new sub assy. from the agents.


The older and more accepted method of selecting the correct bearing for an overhauled sub assy is where the crank is measured, the size determined and an over sized bearing set purchased for the engine.
These bearings are mostly aftermarket and made by AE, Vandervel, CP and such..Here you will be told by the engineer or self determine that the crank needs to be ground one or even two sizes under. This will only be the case when a std sized journal measures too small for a std. size bearing to be used again.
You will then buy your 0.010" under bearing set and then grind the journals to suite. For those who do not know what the above size is, it is ten thou-ten thousands of an inch or 0.26 of a mm.

My Lexus V8 engine is a colour coded engine. It is currently being built and luckily I do not need to re size the journals here. I am however, using a set of ACL bearings for it. The journals will be polished to size as the ACL set is std and my crank does vary a little in journal to journal size.

If you do not know something guys, learn and learn some more !! Knowledge is everything.

I would second acl (race) bearings. They come in a variety of sizes so you need your mech do some measuring to determine the state of the current crank (ie if it needs a regrind or a polish). If the crank gets reground, you select an oversized bearing size based on the most work journal and get all the crank journals matched to fit the selected set of oversized bearings. In the sr20 case this is all you need to know.

Thats some interesting stuff, owning a 200sx is turning me into a petrolhead , I saw that the bearings are sold in different grades, are those the different size ranges? I also found a link that tells you how to calculate the bearings you need from numbers found on the crank and block, what is that about?

http://www.cimotorsports.net/webforum/v ... f=26&t=653

the quickest way~ take your crank and block to the bearing place and let them do it...
let them do the job and you pay them~ dont stop worring about size and stuff~

aep886 wrote:the quickest way~ take your crank and block to the bearing place and let them do it...
let them do the job and you pay them~ dont stop worring about size and stuff~

I think I will do that, thanks