News from around the Industry

Weiss North America, Inc. of Willoughby, OH has designed and produced rotary tables and other components for the automation industry for more than 45 years. When approached by Alpha Integration, Inc. of Murfreesboro, TN, a manufacturer of turnkey automated assembly, vision and testing systems, to provide a reliable turnkey solution for their 6-foot-tall automotive parts assembly machine, Weiss ‘tiered-up’ an innovative chassis and indexing table system solution.

Bill Walton – a 7 foot tall anomaly from the annals of basketball history who wears tie-dye shirts, listens to the Grateful Dead and, according to his own outlandish proclamations, hasn’t taken an indoor shower in 35 years – is well-known for looking at average accomplishmentsand being overcome with extreme fits of emotion.

I don’t recall a single bearing class where someone didn’t want to know what the largest bearing ever made was. From my stint as a bearing engineer...

Happy New Year! I am pleased to announce that I will be your new blog writer for PTE. If we haven’t been introduced, my name is Norm Parke...

Some of us are old enough to have had say, great-grandparents, for example, who when the occasion arose would casually refer to cars as “machines.” It sounded funny and arcane, and we would snicker under our breath. But of course the laugh was on us; back in the day — 1910s through the 1930s — automobiles were commonly referred to as machines.

The motors might be small, but the big-brain technology driving these electrical wonders was on full display at the 2014 Small Motor & Motion Association Fall Technical Conference, convened November 4-6 in St. Louis, MO. SMMA, the manufacturing trade association (120 members strong) that tends to the best interests of the electric motor and motion control industries — including manufacturers, suppliers, users, consultants and universities — played gracious host to a wide array of presenters from an equally diverse range of sources — from academia to the federal government. Like gears, motors are most everywhere, as evidenced by SMMA’s membership (consumer-, public interest-, national defense- and commercial-oriented) demographic which includes: appliance; transportation; medical equipment; office automation and computers; aerospace; and industrial automation. The association’s mission: To “serve as the principal voice of the electric motors and drives industry” and to provide a forum to “develop, collect and disseminate technical and management knowledge.”

A wide variety of companies displayed mechanical power transmission and motion control technologies at Pack Expo, held in November in Chicago. The event, which is the largest packaging and processing trade show in North America, attracted more than 48,000 attendees, according to show owner and producer PMMI. The four-day event included 2,352 exhibiting companies, an increase of more than 19 percent from the previous show in 2012.

EDITORS’ NOTE: “The Applications of Bevel Gears” is the excerpted third chapter of Dr. Hermann Stadtfeld’s latest book — Gleason Bevel Gear Technology (The Gleason Works, Rochester, New York, USA; All rights reserved. 2014; ISBN 978-0-615-96492-8.), which appears here unabridged through the kind graces of Dr. Stadtfeld and Gleason Corp. Future installments will appear exclusively in Power Transmission Engineering and Gear Technology magazine over the next 12 to 18 months.

News from the industry about new products.