See if Duramax and Morris will give an exact dimension for the outer diameter ------- at least it would then give an intial guide of what to expect from the fit. As I previouslydesribed the P bracket material actually swelled as I was forcing the new bearing in, so my new inner bore size will now be bigger than before.Here is the problem:
I just spoke to Duramax about the bearing they sent me that was out of spec. To put a long story short, they admitted that the catalog dim. for the wall thickness for the "Back" (1.25 OD for a 1" shaft) is incorrectly stating as 3/64 (.046) and should be .058 mine measured close to .70 so there was very little rubber inside the shell (see photo).
Morris manufactures the "Blackfish" same Dim. except the wall is listed as 1/32 or .031. which seem a little thin and may be prone to mushrooming in a tight fit situation. I'm trying to find someone who can spec the part out to see what it really is.
Here is the rub:
Do I go with the Duramax and not have to worry as much about mushrooming during installation, but do worry about scoring the shaft if things get out of alignment, or do I go with the thinner wall Morris and hope it slides in with out too much force and then have much thicker rubber wall to buffer against scoring?
All these problems because the P bracket was designd with too little material around the bearing !! Your notion of a split bush type arrangement to locate the bearing sounds pretty ideal to me --------- seen it applied to many other applicatiions and reckon it would have been the absolute answer here.