I just noticed a discussion about this on one of the sale threads, but this is something I've been meaning to ask about and since it's a discussion here seemed better than there as a place to ask.

I recently came into possession of a vintage Phil Wood bottom bracket. It was on an early 70's Urago I bought. The metal sleeve was coated in some grime, but it cleaned up pretty well. The red paint on Phil's signature was even visible midway through my cleaning, though I seem to have inadvertently eradicated that.

Anyway, it's my first hands on experience with a Phil BB and I was wondering how close mine is to normal (in whatever way you choose to interpret normal).

First off, the bearings on one side will turn independent of the sleeve, but the outer shell of the bearings on the other side seem to have bonded to the sleeve a bit so that if I hold the outer shell and the sleeve I can't turn them in opposite directions. Near as I can tell, that shouldn't actually matter because the spindle turns freely and I don't think the outer shell of the bearing cartridge is actually supposed to spin. This was using French threaded cups, so its even possible some Loctite was applied to keep it from doing so.

More relevantly, the spindle spins freely, as I said. In the other thread [MENTION=340794]Dfrost[/MENTION] mentioned the viscosity of the bottom bracket. That's the real locus of my curiosity. The Phil BB I have almost feels dry. I don't feel any roughness (really, none), but I also don't really feel any significant resistance. Granted, this is under no pre-load in my description, but I would expect to at least be feeling the viscosity of some grease and I don't. Is that normal?

And if that is normal, do these things really last forever? I mean, I understand cup and cone bottom brackets lasting forever with proper maintenance but my experience with cartridge bearings has generally been that they last a long time and then you replace them because you can't really do proper maintenance.