Bearing Quality Control Helps Green Energy Initiative
Timken Utilizes LK Metrology for Bearing Inspection and Analysis
The Dudley, UK factory of The Timken Company supplies the engineered bearings it manufactures into a multitude of industries including mining, food and beverage, pulp and paper, cement, marine, and wastewater. Recently there has been a significant increase in demand for larger bearings up to 1,200 mm in diameter for use in the construction of wind turbines, which promises exponential growth in the coming years as countries across the globe work towards meeting their green energy targets.
Maciej Majchrzak, quality inspector, inspecting a Timken engineered bearing outer race.
To enable the company to inspect these larger bearings, Timken purchased an AlteraM 15.12.10 ceramic bridge coordinate measuring machine (CMM) with axis travels of 1,500 x 1,200 x 1,000 mm manufactured by LK Metrology Castle Donington. Assisting further in Timken's quality control department is a Mitutoyo CMM capable of measuring ball and roller bearings with bores up to 800 mm in diameter. This machine was upgraded at the same time by LK with a new controller and identical CAMIO 2021 software for measurement, programming, analysis and reporting so that inspectors are able to swap programs conveniently between both machines.
Dozens of high precision geometrical features need to be checked on each bearing to ensure that flatness, circularity, radial run-out and track width meet specified tolerances, some of which are within ± 6 µm. This is achieved quickly, repeatably and automatically on the CMMs at Dudley in computer-controlled cycle times of around 10 minutes.
William Hayes, quality improvement engineer at the Dudley factory commented, "We selected LK Metrology to provide the new inspection facility, as it was the only potential supplier to offer us a new, well-priced, high accuracy machine of the right capacity. The company was also proactive in offering to retrofit new control software to our Mitutoyo BN710 CMM, as we need two measuring machines to cope with our increasing production throughput.
"Another point in LK's favor was that its CMMs are installed in Timken plants in other parts of the world, including in the United States, so the supplier was not an unknown quantity. It would in theory be possible to exchange programs internationally, but in practice this is unlikely to happen as most of our other sites are mass production environments, whereas we specialize in producing small quantities of engineered bearings below 10-off."
Bearing outer race inspection in progress by touch probing and scanning in a single 10-minute cycle. 
