6000 Series Deep Groove Ball Bearings

The extra-light series, and the smallest of the three general-purpose series (6000 / 6200 / 6300). Narrower and smaller across than both the 6200 and the 6300, so the thinnest housing and the lightest bearing of those three — and the lowest load capacity.

The 6000 series is the extra-light diameter series — the digit 0 in the second position of the designation. For a given bore it gives the smallest outside diameter and the smallest width of the three general-purpose series on this site; only the thin-section 61700, 61800 and 61900 go smaller, and they are a different trade rather than simply a smaller step. As everywhere else here it has one consequence in each direction: it saves space and mass, and it costs load capacity, because the rings are thinner and there is less room inside for rolling elements. The 16000 series is not a step on that ladder at all: it has the 6000's outside diameter exactly and only a narrower ring, so it swaps into the same housing and saves axial space instead of radial.

The comparison at a single bore makes the trade explicit. On a 20 mm shaft, a 61704 is 27 mm across and 4 mm wide, a 61804 is 32 × 7, a 61904 is 37 × 9, a 6004 is 42 × 12 — and the 16004 shares that 42 mm housing bore 4 mm narrower — then a 6204 at 47 × 14, a 6304 at 52 × 15 and a 6404 at 72 × 19. Same shaft, eight series, and only the 6004 / 16004 pair share a housing: everywhere else the outside diameter is what changes, and with it the load the bearing will take. Because ISO 15 fixes every one of those sets of dimensions, the choice is a decision about the machine, not about the supplier.

The series runs from 6000 (10 mm bore, 26 mm outside diameter, 8 mm wide) to 6060 (300 mm bore, 460 mm outside diameter, 74 mm wide) in the 37 designations tabulated here. Worth noting: at the small end the ring section is thin enough that the series is often chosen for its low mass and low friction torque rather than for anything structural — small electric motors, instruments, and mechanisms where the bearing is holding a shaft in place rather than carrying a load. That is general practice, not a property of the dimensions.

Every designation in the table below links to its own page with the ISO 15 dimensions, the bore-code arithmetic, the ISO 5753-1 clearance ranges for its bore, and the same-bore comparison against every other series.

This series runs from a 10 mm to a 300 mm bore. The sub-library as a whole reaches 300 mm of bore, and the widest single bearing in it is a 6360, 620 mm across, in the 6300 series. This is one of the series that gets to that top bore.

d = bore diameter, D = outside diameter, B = width. All of them are ISO 15 standard values and are the same for every manufacturer. r s min is the minimum single chamfer dimension the plan gives; its matching maximum is in ISO 582, which is why the column says “min” and not an equality. The last column is derived: radial section = (D − d) / 2, the wall thickness you are working with when you size the housing. No load rating and no limiting speed appears here — see the bearings index for why.

Outside diameter × overall size in millimetres, for the 5 smallest bores in this database. The full charts, one per type, are on the bearings index. Reading a row is what a machine designer does when the shaft is already fixed: the bore does not change, the housing bore does. Across the type boundary the last number changes meaning — it is a width above and a height below — so compare within a type, then decide whether the job wants a ball bearing, a tapered roller or a thrust bearing at all. The 6 series whose type has no bore are not rows here: they are indexed by the shaft they run on, and their chart is above.