My favorite head set story, and one I think shows them to be essentially jewelry for most normal geometry bikes, is the one from my former commuter. It was 20 y.o. Miyata I bought from the original owner. He didn't do anything for maintenance because he literally never road it. It still had the factory tires.
I road it hard daily commuting for a few years and after a while the headset started indexing. A little at first which got progressively worse to the point at the end it would really get my attention on a fast, winding downhill. I had done nothing to maintain it and figured it was probably time to replace it. I also wondered if I rotated it 90 degrees that would solve the indexing. Seemed like it shouldn't matter, but what the heck, I took it apart to see if it would show any signs of indentation on the races. There wasn't any. They were like brand new from all that my eye could tell. I repacked the grease put it back together surprisingly to me it was like new again. My guess is replacing the grease spun the flat parts on the balls to be out of the way. I don't know. It seems unlikely that the balls themselves would get flat spots, maybe something else was the cause of the indexing, but that's what I experienced. Unfortunately no pictures to prove it happened. :-) Regards, -Allan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rbw-owners-bunch/-/32apncQ9vewJ. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
