Maintenance-friendly adapter ball bearings cut lifecycle costs
Mark Crocker reports on the maintenance friendly features of an adapter ball bearing and how they can substantially reduce equipment lifecycle costs.Offering a much lower cost of ownership than a conventional ball bearing system, Baldor's Dodge Grip Tight features a patented 'easy-off' adapter system, and housing designs that will accept as many as seven different sizes of concentric, 360-degree shaft rings.
The concentric bearing adapter press-fits onto the shaft, and automatically loosens for maintenance or replacement by simply turning a nut - which pulls the bearing off and pushes the adapter in the opposite direction. This innovation avoids any need for forcible removal or expansion heating - eliminating fretting corrosion and preventing shaft damage.
The bearing technology reduces system vibration and allows for quieter operation. Grip Tight bearings are engineered to run at higher speeds and operate cooler, for longer grease life. This reliability is aided by a Proguard Plus Seal with flingers, which protects by keeping lubricants in and contaminants out.
The adapter Dodge Grip Tight ball bearing range is available as standard in cast iron housings, or in polymer or stainless steel housings for use in washdown applications or other harsh operating environments.
The Grip Tight ball system has transformed the economics of maintaining Sapphire Energy Recovery's tyre shredding machines. The bearing's flinger seal and built-in mechanism for removing the bearing from the shaft, has completely resolved a recurrent - and expensive - repair problem.
Sapphire operates high-throughput shredding machines throughout the UK, providing a sustainable solution for end-of-life car and van tyres by processing them into chips. These chips are then used as an alternative to coal in cement manufacture.
After shredding, tyre chips are graded for size by a classifier with 36 sets of bearings. The classifier shafts' set-screw style bearings were being damaged, by both the fine metal wires in the tyres, and the water used for cooling. They had a life of less than six months
Changing the bearings could then take anything up to two hours per bearing, depending on the problems encountered and the skill of the operators. Corrosion sometimes meant that the bearings needed to be loosened by heat, for example, and in some cases the whole shaft had to be replaced.
Sapphire purchased some Grip Tights and installed them as and when bearings failed. Although predictable maintenance was the major goal, it became obvious that the bearings offered superior life too. The Grip Tight's built-in flinger seal is protecting the bearings in the hostile environment to such as en extent that they are lasting typically twice as long as the set screw types.
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Mark Crocker is with Baldor UK Ltd, Bristol, UK. <a href="http://www.baldor.co.uk"target=_blank>www.baldor.co.uk</a>
