Nope, never use a bearing when all thats needed is a bushing. I made my own sulklie and purposely bought wheels with bushings, 5 years old now and no problems. My leaf rigs are 20 plus year old Proline's and everythings in the casters are bushed. Yeah they're loose AF but not needing to be switched out.
But then you have to grease them...
Yeah I'm biased on this on this one. I am a wanna-be machinst with a lathe so whitling out some bushings brings me joy. And around here it may be a quicker repair option.
I'm cool with that, I enjoy going down to the metal fabricators shop and have them cut my own spacers (the steel "tubes" that go inside the roller bearings) for like $1-$2 a piece (versus paying $10 for the actual part online).
But now, and I have to study the wear effect...
I have one sulky with 3/4" ID bearings and a spacer.
And another with 1/2" ID bearings and no spacer.
So then it boils down to whether it's cheaper / easier to replace the spacer or the bolt, and how it wears and how fast, whether either way makes a difference, all that I will see going about 20 or 50-100 hours down the road from here.
Additionally no hassle of greasing bearings and the sloppy residue that builds up from greasing bushings. One less bit of maintenance.
That was my big thing, I'm tired of grease gun hassles... In addition to what you just mentioned (which is enough already) there is also the hassle of grease guns being exposed to temperature extremes... These guns are stored in either a garage or a shed, so in summer the grease gets to flowing and that creates a mess in itself and in winter it solidifies and won't hardly come out (until after I'm done hitting the grease gun with a blow torch lol which is another several minutes of patience based frustration control exercises).
Or how about zerks, here's a good one...
Middle of winter, the fitting won't take any grease.
Is it the grease, too thick from the cold?
Meh, the zerk hasn't been replaced in forever, pull it out...
Get a new one (I keep a whole box of these so no issues there) go to thread it and...
It won't thread! Grab another, same problem, finally after much coaxing and some cross- threading it's on there.
But, it won't take no grease.
Because lucky me it's actually the grease gun nozzle that's clogged.
Granted most of the time it's not like that, but I've purchased quite a few guns over the years, parts too... And when it is like that it can waste a good bit of time lol
Hard to believe I've dealt with this for 20 years and never really thought of using ball bearings, I guess I just thought it's the way it is and there's no other way.
