Just a quick FYI....
Just got a newsletter from Boca Bearings..
Saw this little Info Note and thought it could be of use.
Q: What is an ABEC Rating?
A: Precision ball bearings are manufactured to standards established by the Annular Bearing Engineers Committee (ABEC) of the American Bearing Manufacturers Association (ABMA). The ABEC and ISO bearing standards are primarily concerned with bearing tolerances. The tolerance is the permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension. The higher the ABEC rating the closer the part is to being dimensionally perfect.
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What that doesn't say is that only the inner and outer races are checked for the abec rating, not the balls or cages. Also, the difference between the levels is so slight that it is only an important factor for bearings that spin at very high speeds for extended durations.
For fishing reel bearings, the actual bearing design is more important than the abec rating. I have new abec 3 bearings that spin better than many new abec 7 bearings.
My understanding is the they are rated (RPM's) for machinery use, and so the question is; does a fishing reel actually need certain upgrade bearings, per se (nothing wrong with it for those that are using 7's or others). Admittedly I am not an expert on this, just giving my humble opinion from what I understand from some people who do understand bearings well. ABEC 5's are great, think some of the old newell's that used to really buz were 3's. Your reel is only going to spin at so many RPM's depending on how clean the bearings are and the type of speed lube. If you service a good bearing and use a good speed lube you should get great results. Be sure and clean the inside of the pinion gear so it is not making contact with the spool shaft for any reason. I think there is a lot of hype about bearings, I am sure others have a different point fo view. Many of my small bass reels that I repair (Citica's-Currado's) are getting 103-106 seconds of spin....even some of the 8/9 year old old reels get at least 45 to 50 seconds or more which is better than out of the box....Cheers! :0)
The spin of a bearing has nothing to do with the ABEC ratings, a high end ABEC 3 can spin better than a low end ABEC 7. What counts is the quality of the bearings themselves.
Spool speed is always and interesting subject. I had a conversation with a Shimano tech rep on the subject and his position is that anything beyond a quality ABEC 5 bearing is unnecessary because the spools on regular baitcasters do not spin fast enough to warrant their use.
Cage design has more to do with spin speed than anything else. Most cages are some forme of a ribbon cage. Some have very little contact with the balls and some have a lot of contact. We use boca OS 7 hybrids in a lot of freshwater reels. We don't unse them because of the abec raating but because they have a very small cae with almost no friction between the balls and the cages. This allows them to spin very free.