Abstract The paper considers wear-free friction of ShKh-15 (ShKh) steel balls on the surface of quartz glass (QG) and borosilicate glass (BG) vessels in organic liquids and water. It is shown that it is impossible to accurately predict which material will wear out faster: hard or soft, ball or substrate. The highest correlation between the wear of coupling friction surfaces is found for balls and the total wear of working bodies (r ≈ 1). In the group of glass balls, the balls wear out more often (19 out of 21 tests) than in the group of steel balls (5 out of 9 tests). Wearless friction is more often observed in coupled pairs BG/ShKh (5 cases) than in pairs QG/ShKh (1 case). Coupling surfaces containing only one terminal SiOH group do not provide wear-free boundary friction. The usefulness of the work is in the fact that the results of studies of wear-free friction obtained for the ShKh/H2O pair can find practical application in the creation of bearings and large human joints.