ORIGINAL: superlight
Just to share...
Older v-spec main bearing are 10 balls and the newer batch comes with 9 balls which is suppose to last longer.
I don't know when the change was made but I suppose lesser but bigger balls will last longer.
Go to amains ,look at the vspecs mainbearing photo and count the balls, I counted 10, now, again at amains, go to
RB page and look at the C5 bearings, which is the same size, count the balls in the bearing, I counted 9.
I was told that, you can actually see the diffrence between new and old by looking at the heatsink, will check it out and fill you guys up when I ask my pal again, didn't remember it as I wasn't interested in the vspecs at that time.
If you mean the older and newer v-spec then it's obvious that they differ mainly by just looking the head since one it's blue and the other is black with red writing.
As for the balls in the bearing it's not increasing by the number of balls.
There is a fixed size of the bearing but the number of balls may be different(some less -some more) depending on how close the balls are to each other.
I suppose more balls means better bearing since there are more of them to take the forces from the high revs and torque.