CVT BOSS SLIDE, WHAT TYPE OF METAL  By  gy6fandan (Read 2,023 times)

I just showed three examples that including photos showing variators with visible pressed in bushings including a GY6 specific model that was by no means top of the line. Did you open the links?

I have held some of those in my hand and personally seen that there are indeed bushings pressed into them. I have service station manuals for working on scooter that specifically caution against cleaning the variator with a solvent to prevent service issues down the road.

I don't mean to argue , what we are saying is that they are not really bushings . That's all , all variators even my stock variators have this , and I apologize for saying these are not pressed in because I'm sure they are . Bushings are used to reduce vibration and usually consists of some type of rubber or metal with rubber .

There are many types of bushings with some used to prevent fraying of cables or wires, made of rubber/silicone/urathane to absorb vibrations or made of oilite/sintered bronze/Boston bronze/sintered steel/siliconized aluminum in place of rotational or linear bearings. I believer the use of siliconized aluminm may have been pioneered by Briggs and Stratton for the creation of unsleeved aluminum engine blocks which has worked out quite well for engines with less than 5 or 8 hp with Cool Bore possibly being the original trade designation of the block which also had a bit of ceramic in the alloy for extended wear. In the case of the better made variators they're used as linear bearings to more easily slide on the boss with less wear. They are usually not considered replaceable since by the time they are worn the drive faces and ramps are worse for the wear and the entire assembly needs replacement anyway however through Timkens, Dodge, Reeves or Festo you can many times, after getting your calipers out and measuring them up, order replacements of higher quality.

My background is in industrial maintenance and machine design so this is a process I had carried out very many times before I had a crippling accident. I maintained equipment that had no US suppliers of parts or were so old that the OEM's no longer existed or the equpment was made in-house being one of a kind and I use to keep the bearing catalogs and Thompsons registers on my desk to research best sources for these types of parts. Many used manually adjusted CVT drives which although some technically were no longer supported one could still spec parts for them. With a well affiliated local industrial bearing and drive supplyhouse no job is really impossible with the solution many times being to belly up to the counter and confer with the supplier face to face. On a machine that is part of a multi-million dollar production line of course this makes more sense than for a $500 scooter but if you have the right supplier who will work with you nothing is impossible.