BEARING FAILURE TRAINER
Identify failure modes from real bearings. Six rounds, six wear signatures. Train your eye — and your diagnostic instinct.
When you pull a failed bearing during a teardown, the wear pattern is the engine confessing what killed it. Misread the pattern and you replace the bearing without fixing the upstream cause — the new bearing fails the same way in 5,000-30,000 miles. This trainer drills the six classic patterns until you can identify them in seconds. Pair with the A1 Bearing Failure Library for the deep dive.
A bearing photo appears. Pick the failure mode that matches. If you nail it, learn the root cause + repair scope. If you miss it, the explanation tells you the visual signature you missed. Six rounds covers all six classic modes. Score 5/6 or better and you're ready to read bearings on the bay floor.
Need a refresher? Open the A1 Bearing Failure Library first — full detail on each mode, then come back here to drill.
INTERACTIVE — Identify the Failure
ROUND 1 / 6 · SCORE 0
QUICK CHECK
Every failure mode has an upstream source. Replace bearings without fixing the source = new ones fail the same way within months. Address the cause first: oil supply, alignment, contamination, fluid level, duty cycle.
Overload wear runs perpendicular to the bearing axis (concentrated in the load zone). Misalignment runs diagonally (one end heavier than the other). Look at the wear angle carefully — they point at different root causes.
200,000-mile bearings showing even surface wear and light spalling = normal end-of-life, not failure. Don't sell a teardown rebuild on normal wear unless there's another diagnostic reason.
Cut the old filter, examine the media. Particle type tells you which component is wearing — copper (bearings), aluminum (pistons), iron (rings/walls), brass (bushings). Free evidence; don't waste it.
Bearing Failure Identification
- Smearing with raised edge, one-sided = OVERLOAD (detonation, bent rod, excess clearance).
- Heat blueing + exposed copper underlayer = OIL STARVATION (pump, pickup, level, galley).
- Embedded particles + scoring = CONTAMINATION (skipped filter, prior failure debris).
- Diagonal wear band = MISALIGNMENT (bent rod, twisted crank, warped block).
- Mud-crack flaking on loaded half = FATIGUE SPALLING (normal end-of-life or chronic overload).
- Honeycomb pitting near oil hole = CAVITATION (aerated oil, pickup leak, pump suction).
Bearings don't lie. Whatever happened to the engine left a signature on the failed bearing. Reading that signature in 30 seconds — instead of "the bearing's shot, let's quote a rebuild" — is the difference between fixing a $30 leaking pickup gasket and rebuilding the same engine three times. The senior techs read bearings like X-rays. So can you, with practice.