Green bearings or stock adjustable

lemondana said
The green style bearings have balls in them, The Ford 9 inch uses straight rollers in their bearings, at least from what I remember. I used 3 sets of Green bearings and I don't believe I got close to 10,000 miles out of any of them. I will never use another set of the Greens! Does anyone use BALL bearings on their front brake hubs? I don't think so! That went out in the 50's.

If your green bearings didn't last 10k miles you either had the earlier style or you did something wrong.

I have a set of green bearings my '72 Challenger that have gone close to 70k miles, no issues at all. I prefer the tapered bearings myself, but when I swapped in the B-body 8 3/4 into my Challenger the axles that came with it had brand new green bearings already installed on them. I figured I'd run them until they wore out. They haven't yet. If/when they do they'll get replaced with tapered bearings, but the later redesigned green bearings work pretty well.

lemondana said
Sorry, I haven't worked on a Ford in a long time. I didn't know they used tapered bearings.

Not all of them do, most of them do come with a sealed, ball-bearing style bearing. But a bunch of them did come with tapered bearings. Even before the set 20's came out in '79 there was another tapered version of the Ford 9" bearings that came on the 3,700 lb rated 9's.

So, it's not safe to assume that just because it's a Ford 9" that it has the sealed ball-bearing style axle bearings. Especially with all the aftermarket versions of the 9" out there. Hell, Currie makes a "pro-touring" 9" that has full floating axles in it for the really crazy road race and autoX guys with deep wallets. There isn't much "ford" about it, but it's still a 9".