During the summer I took my brother on a bike trip to the Gulf Islands. On day four he said his crank was making a grinding noise and when I checked it was kinda wobbly but we made it home ok. Today he brought his bike over to see what was wrong.

Schwinn Frisco Commuter, barely ridden.

Seems someone put the bearing races in backwards

is that a race? or a ball bearing cage?

i can't imagine how a crank could turn with a race in backwards, but caged bearings are often put in backwards.

not that it matters much if looking at life as a whole...

My brain fart. It's the bearing cage.

Loose bearings are supposed to be better but I remember the big hassle of cleaning headsets w/loose bearings--apply grease thickly to races & stick the bearings on & hope they don't fall out when reassembling.

Yep, that's what I had to do in this case as well as the fixed cup was seized in-looked like painted in.
The good news is a total repair bill including parts = $1

So true. I have never been much of a headset guy, I have driven bikes with some pretty bad headsets, and hardly noticed. Plus I have a couple of headsets in reserve that used caged roller bearings that have a ton of bearing for a caged bearing. Also I recently saw a video where a guy used a magnet to catch the bearings in a loose set, it was pretty neat. I do like hubs with loose bearings, but unfortunately the hubs I like best don't have them.

My friend's bike had a scarily loose headset and, for some really baffling reason, two lower bearing races on the fork stacked on top of each other. The seals were also put in opposite of where they were supposed to be. You could shift the fork back and forth an inch or so without moving the frame. The whole thing was totally f-ed. It was a Target Schwinn.

A few years ago I picked up a very low mileage 1980s Bianchi mixte frame bike from a neighbors trash bin. The bottom bracket bearings on the drive side looked just like that, I replaced with loose balls. (Note, if anyone else needs to do this, I needed two more balls because the cage adds space between each ball.) That bike is now on my trainer for when I need exercise in the winter - although I did have to buy a much taller seatpost and put on a different saddle and pedals.

Amazing how the big-box store bikes still have bad problems despite the retailers using name brands. Back in 70's bike boom the chain stores put out terrible brand-X bikes that would quickly self-destruct which was actually a big boost for LBS's.

You can slap any name on a frame and call it name brand. Schwinn has been gone for a while. The only thing they have in common with Schwinn's of old is that they both look like bikes and have a similar head badge.

Yes, I guess too few Americans remember the real Schwinns for the current owners to feel a need to maintain quality. Too bad, they were pretty good bikes back in the day--not the lightest or most sophisticated but good quality & sturdy. My first real bike was an Austrian-made Sears 5-speed which was pretty good too.

The Paramount stuff was awesome and I have a dream of one day owning one or at least a Waterford. The rest of Schwinn's line was decent but the Paramount was tops.

The Ted Williams Free Spirit is a pretty cool bike, Reynolds 531 tubing, Shimano Crane and Titilst derailluers on a bike you could get from Sears. I don't know about others in that era but that one is actually one I kind of want.

It is really a shame that some of the old now cheap crappy companies don't do things like that anymore.

Once back when I was unemployed, I tried to convince a local Wal-Mart to hire me on a contract basis to build bikes for them. My pitch (which didn't work) was to find a manager and show him all of the safety problems with the bikes they had on the floor. Not surprisingly, most of them had unsafe brakes and poorly adjusted shifters, but there were at least two bikes that were missing small parts, like the barrel adjusters on the brake levers.

My own experience with big-box store bikes is that the bikes aren't very high-quality, but if they are assembled by someone competent, they can be fairly useful. Unfortunately, they're assembled by whatever employee happens to be working at the store that day, regardless of mechanical ability. The big sporting goods stores (Dick's, Big 5, Gart, etc.) are a little better - they actually hire contractors to assemble their bikes, and the contractors mostly know what they're doing. But the piecework pay is so low that the builders have to work very fast to make a reasonable amount of money, so there are a lot of mistakes and not a lot of attention to detail.

I doubt that they put the bearings (not a race...that's in the bottom bracket) in backwards. I see this all the time on many Helmart Schwinns at my local co-op. I've even seen them so bad that the bearings are flattened like skipping stones in the cup. I doubt that the bearing is as hard as it should be and starts to slip in the cage resulting in the cage getting chewed up.

Replace the bearings with loose ones. You should also inspect the cups and the spindle for pitting. Or, the best solution, is to ditch the loose bearings entirely and just replace the bottom bracket with the appropriately sized cartridge bearing unit. Square taper Shimano BB are dirt cheap and solve all kinds of problems.