It's not dork, it's just about a different purpose - BFS.
As I said, there are no unshielded spool bearings offered for Ambassadeur currently on Ali Express and most of Japan, as well.
Onshore, SurfCastProShop sells nice hybrid ceramic spool bearings, but we're trying to get these reels into the couple of g casting range.
These kick butt for big weight.
https://surfcastproshop.com/shop/ols/pr ... ing-abec-7These actually come with the orange seals separate, giving you the choice to use your own racy oil and seal them, or do like I do, keep them flushed and oiled for use.
Go-to for me in surf sizes are MTCW from Japan.
On the left is my home-made 1040 micro bearing - on the right, MTCW 1044
I noticed Hedgehog had started sending quality unshielded 740ZZ bearings with their handle kits.
I set those aside and used the shielded handle knob bearings I had stashed away.
I took a pair of Ray's Studio 1030 micro bearings, and swapped the guts for the good unshielded 740ZZ to make my own pair of 1040 micro bearings.
Speaking of dork, I just opened those MTCW bearings from a sealed package for this photo. Marked 1044, they measure 1154 - they were sorted and packaged incorrectly in Japan. I have places to use 1154 spool bearings, Lew's and ZPI spools, but I bought them for CT surf reel spool bearings.
___________________________________________
You can feel the weight difference between those big stainless bearing races and the micro stainless bearing races.
Casting light weights, you can measure the performance difference between shielded and unshielded bearings.
We're talking edge here - the same way a lighter spool gives you light-lure edge, unshielded micro-bearing is added edge (and a major difference from the full-size bearing above).
I guess I only posted this on BR forum.
https://www.bassresource.com/bass-fishi ... nt=2879479When I set up my Silver Wolf, went through spool and bearing trials casting a 2-g jighead, that's kind of my standard low-end back-acre test. Again, these are all 1030 micro bearings for Daiwa.
On the left is the shielded Daiwa micro bearing; center is Royo micro bearing; right is IXA 1033 double micro bearing (AMO is including a pair of these now in their 34 mm Daiwa BFS spool). The spools were stock Daiwa SW, Ray's Studio SV, and lightweight champ Roro-X.
The difference between the shielded and unshielded micro bearings was a bit over 10%.
The greatest difference between all spool (weight) and matched bearings was over 50%.
The Roro bearings only had a slight edge over the IXA double bearings, and the double bearings are a boon for casting wide weight range - for light weights, only the inner race spins - with heavy weight (20 to 30 g) the outer race spins. Unfortunately, they can't make these with ID larger than 3 mm, but they're choice if you want to fish a Daiwa from finesse to 6" plugs and take full advantage of an SV spool.
Noteworthy, any of these 1030 bearings work in the '70s and '80s 4600C.