There are industrial big box stores that can get you the bearings. There was a long discussion about which bearings to use for the Milwaukee/Sioux angle drills (I think Milwaukee makes their own now). If you still have the parts list on the info you got with the drill, the stores can look up the specs as well as your repair shop. You do want double sealed, not sheilded bearings. You may want to have the brushes replaced or looked at too. Once it starts to make noise, that is the time to replace the bearings. I wore out the plastic housing on a couple of my drills by not taking them in soon enough. You could also call the repair place and tell them what is going on, and they could order parts and have them in for you, when you need to take the drill in. Cost last time for me was about $80. I don't really know if the factory bearings are any better than the special ones you can buy. Still, the biggest problem with these angle drills is that they are drills and we use them as grinders. I did buy one of the cordless Milwaukee screw guns with the 12 volt batteries. Speed range is perfect, but I get about 1 bowl out of a charge. I do sand at about 600 rpm or less. The slower speeds allow for more traction, and the abrasives cut faster and better than high speeds. This also gets me more life time out of a set of bearings. Using the 3 inch discs, at high speeds, I would get 300 plus bowls of various sizes. When I dropped to slow speed, it went up to 400 plus.
I will be putting in a call to Milwaukee later this week to see if I can do a hard wire on my cordless drill or maybe convince them to make some thing better. The screw guns are far better for taking the torque loads that our sanding puts on the drills. Now, if they had a mini Hole Hawg!!!
robo hippy
