With the new 1976 Westinghouse Front load washer bought in 1976, its 6205 bearings started to get noisy about say roughly 2000 ish; ie 24 years of usage. The machine still was used with noisy bearing noise until the one closest to the water seal had it's cage break about a month before Katrina in 2005. The machine actually still would wash but sounded like a wild mess in the spin cycle. If one had to one could wash and rinse and use the clothes line.
The back/rear 6205 ball bearing technically is shot; it has more than the classical 10 percent area on its bearing races pitted. Still that bearing in the rear really was never all rusted either, and really could if one had to be reused if one was on a desert island. The bearings from 1976 are from Japan; NTN bearings.
Thus from a ball bearings purists standpoint one got 24 years until one got bearing noise, and 29 years before an actual failure of the products purpose due to ONE out of two bearings.
"failure" is often based on Harris/Skf's criteria of 10 percent pitting by surface area of the races.
"failure" too can be defined when the device no longer works as designed; like the 29 years and then the front bearings cage started to come apart and some of the balls were not equally spaced.
"failure" can be too by just noise and customers complain. Often a ball bearing can go 10 times longer with being noisy.
The washer is different; the ball bearings once the water seal fails dies 100 time quicker once exposed to open water and soap.
Thus classical ball bearing life almost never gets hit with a washer; the leaky seal cuts it short by 10 to 200 times. The primary failure is corrosion ude to the seal leaking.
Its is like if some health food freaks who never smoked or drinked wanted to live to be 120; but all take up skydiving, playing with sharks; playing in the freeway; going off to war zones without helmets; ie many die much sooner than the "planned 120 years".
The seal's LIFE really is the key; when it fails the ball bearings die radically sooner.
If the seal still is smaller than the shafts "seal surface" the seal can still work. IF the seals matings surface is too rough the new seal will fail quicker; the seals "lips" are worn off. Thus the seal's mating surface really has to be touched up, smoothed. This might be a lost art, eons ago folks rebuilt water pumps in cars and it was super common; yea! in the usa 6 volt car era!
I would not even try to get the shaft off or think about it until I had an actual NEW seal to test the shafts seal surface.
