Bearings are often regarded as just another machine component, to be fitted and forgotten, but they are a key precision element, the unseen hero, keeping everything moving. Bearings contribute significantly to the productivity of your machinery, process line or production facility, therefore keeping your bearings healthy, maintained and fit for purpose generates longer life, maximises uptime, and saves you money in the long term.

Rolman World is partnered with some of the worlds leading bearing manufacturers to ensure high quality, performance and technical advice is at your fingertips, but what happens to the bearing after fitting is just as important. This is where Rolman World sales staff and engineers can help they have years of industry and product experience, they understand the complexity of bearings, what affects performance, signs of a problem bearing, and how to get the best service life out of your bearings and therefore improve your machines performance.

Maintaining your bearings:

Selection – Fit for purpose
Selecting the right bearing for the working conditions plays a paramount role in improving uptime. If the incorrect bearing is chosen for an environment that does not fit its purpose – dusty, dirty, wet, humid or contaminated environments – then the life of the bearing will be significantly reduced. With years of industry and product know-how, our sales staff can help you select the right bearing for the job.

Poor fitting
Even before the bearing has performed one revolution, its life can be significantly reduced by poor fitting. The initial mounting is a critical factor to the life of a bearing. A vast amount of premature bearing failures are caused by poor fitting and maintenance personnel being unaware or unable to use the correct fitting tools. At Rolman World, our MRO engineers can help customers with fitting, mounting and dismounting, training and equipment.

Monitoring & Timely replacement
Along with ensuring appropriate selection and mounting, service personnel need to ensure that bearings are monitored and maintained. With the appropriate load on a bearing, it should spin almost silently, but when machines are overloaded or neglected bearings suffer. Bearings dont usually fail abruptly they can be slowly failing long before you hear or see the signals of imminent failure and replacement. As bearings are often hidden out of sight in machinery, the early warning signals can be missed, therefore using monitoring equipment as part of the routine maintenance process is ideal to catch premature failure, saving you time and money.

Lubrication
Most bearings are fitted ready lubricated and just expected to run forever, but inevitably any bearing starved of lubrication will fail long before its service life ends. Service personnel need to understand that lubrication is crucial to prolonging the life of a bearing, ensuring smooth running, reduced friction, and reduced contamination (in contaminated environments the grease helps to act as a barrier to keep contaminants out of the bearing). At Rolman World we have a wide range of quality lubricants, from 200g pouches to 18kg drums for manual re-lubrication, or fully automated lubrication systems for those hard to reach installations.

With these key maintenance basics in hand, service personnel can stop compounding the possibilities of premature bearing failure and costly unplanned downtime, and help bearings continue to perform effortlessly to the end of their service lifetime.

Through years of industry knowledge and experience Rolman World engineers understand bearings and can help save you money and downtime, keeping your World in Motion.

For more information on bearing specifications, failure, fitting, and maintenance issues contact: sales@rolman.com