honestly i would stick with honda badged bearings and seals and gaskets. only because its a guessing game what youll get in the aftermarket kits. sometimes trying to save a couple dollars can bite you later.
You will always get the bearing with the right internal clearance when you buy OEM ball bearings.
The dimension where the balls and rollers ride in the inner and outer races have the same dimensions for the majority of the common internal bearing clearances. The clearance is adjusted by the size of the balls and rollers. C3 bearings have bigger balls than C4 bearings. Bearings with a C3 clearance is tighter than a bearing with a C4 clearance.
So what am I trying to say.
The number on the outside of an OEM bearing does not always reflect the actual internal clearance of the bearing.
Why?
OEM purchasing agents are always looking for deals on bearings or occasionally needing large quantities of bearings on short notice.
Sometimes bearing manufactures are in the middle of a production run of let say bearings that have the dimensions needed for main bearings on the ends of a crankshaft. The bearings have already been marked with a part number that designates a C3 internal clearance. An engine manufacture calls up their bearing manufacturer and says I need 5000 bearings with a C4 internal clearance. The bearing manufacturer says it will be a month before we make a run on the requested bearings that will be marked as C4 bearings. The bearing manufacturer says "We already have 10,000 inner and outer races made and marked with part numbers designating a C3 clearance but have not been assembled." "We can put the C4 balls in the races but the part number will not reflect the true internal clearance." The engine manufacture says that is ok, we just need C4 bearings and do not care what numbers are on the bearing.
The engine manufacture assembles 4000 new engines with the C4 bearings marked C3 and puts the other 1000 bearings into the replacement parts network. Years later someone is rebuilding their engine and goes to the motorcycle dealer to buy a set of main bearings and the dealer wants $40.00 per bearing. The owner is trying to do the job as cheap as possible so he takes the old bearing to the local bearing warehouses or calls one of the discount bearing suppliers online and they set him up with a new set of C3 bearings that are made by the same manufacturer that made the OEM bearings. A couple of middlemen have been eliminated and the bearings cost $20.00 per bearing and have the same part numbers on the bearing as the OEM bearing.
The owner assembles the engine and it runs for a short while and the main bearings fails. He figures he may have done something wrong assembling the engine because this was his first rebuild. He did not know that the bearing he installed was a C3 and should have been a C4. It would have been a C4 bearing regardless of what was printed on the outside of the bearing had he bought the OEM main bearings from his local motorcycle dealer.
I have seen the above scenario occur more than once with customers. Early in my career it happened to me trying to save some customers some money on their rebuilds.
