How ball Bearing Works: A Brief Guide The first thing I'm going to do is take a cross-section and we can see some of the parts. So we've got our steel balls. Image: Google Image Let me just back it up a moment. Got our steel balls. These are the rolling elements. We've got our separator slash retainer slash cage. We've got the inner ring. And we've got the outer ring. Inner ring, also known as inner race, an outer ring, also known as outer race. We've then got a seal, and we can also change this to have a shield instead. You can see here that thew shield is metal, whereas, on the seal, it's most likely going to be rubber or Teflon. We can have a look at the raceways. What I'll do is I'll remove the balls and I will remove the separator, and now we can see the raceways. There are two parts to this raceway. We have the outer ring raceway and the inner ring raceway. Now, depending on the depth of the outer ring raceway an...