Hello,

This all started here so you can read the preliminaries:
Reliable Source For Cartridge Bearings?

I got the replacement bearings in and have disassembled the hub and found what I believe to be the root cause of my early bearing failure.

First let me reiterate that these bearings are deep groove radial ball bearings. These types of bearings are not intended to take any amount of side load. Whit Industries incorrectly calls this "preload".

White's instructions and their apparent factory assembly removes the horizontal play in the axle with a locking collar on one end of the axle. The instructions tell you to remove all of the axle play and then tighten the locking collar set screw.

This works fine UNTIL you insert the QR skewer and tighten the wheel in the dropouts. When you do this the axle deforms (compresses lengthwise). This causes substantial side loading of the bearings which causes excessive wear and early failure in short order!

I actually learned this same lesson 25 years ago with a Shimano cup & cone hub where I adjusted the bearing freeplay outside of the dropout i.e. no axle compression. Those bearings failed in short order. I replaced them, this time with some noticeable play after clamping in the dropout. These bearings haven't failed since. A little bearing play is MUCH better than zero clearance. This Shimano hub has a steel axle which I expect should compress significantly less than the aluminum one in the White Industries hubs.

The bottom line is that this design/assembly weakness affects ALL of White Industries QR hubs. The apparent solution is to loosen the bearing collar set screw before first assembly into a fork/frame, tighten the QR to max compression and only then tighten the set screw on the locking collar.

Now I have to look at the rear hub as it will likely have the same issue. It gets more complicated since it has 3 setscrews instead of 1.