June 19, 2002 | Peachtree City, GA: The way design engineer Dave Kayser figures it, he would have paid more for the mounting block to retain a needle bearing than he would have paid for the bearing itself in a new machine he's working on. "We wanted a design that was inexpensive, yet durable," says Kayser, a senior mechanical designer at Pitney Bowes. "The question was how to mount the bearing in sheet metal panels only 2 mm thick?"

Kayser almost had to scrap his original thin-wall design, which would have meant coming up with some sort of housing and figuring out a way to manage any tooling hole misalignment. But then he came across a new type of bearing that combines a rolling element with a self-clinching retainer, allowing direct installation of the bearing into sheet metal as this as 1 mm.

Called ReadyMount™, the patented bearing also features a self-aligning insert that compensates for up to a ±5° misalignment of hole centers on the chassis assembly.

The bearing, the result of a joint development effort between Spyraflo and the Torrington Co. (Torrington, CT), is one of two new bearing products that incorporate Spyraflo's mounting and alignment technology. The other product, co-developed with Garlock Bearings (Thorofare, NJ), is a bushing with the same self-clinching, self-aligning capabilities.

Spyraflo has manufactured a self-clinching mount and various self-aligning products for 35 years. And although it may sound like an easy enough exercise to integrate these technologies into bearing units, Spyraflo's Peter Allen says that a fair amount of engineering was required. "In order to give the insert the strength required to retain a needle bearing, for example, we had to make it out of steel," says Allen.Drawn cup needle bearings with a full-contact, self-aligning insert and retainer housing can be directly installed in sheet metal as thin as 1 mm.

"We also had to produce the insert to exacting tolerances in order to meet the technical requirements for mounting the bearing." Targeted for use in price-sensitive assemblies that require smooth-running shafts, the ReadyMount bearing is already making its way into a number of OEM applications. As for the new bushing product, Spyraflo just introduced it at the National Design Engineering Show in Chicago in mid-March. Allen expects it to do as well as the ReadyMount.

For further information contact:

Peter Allen
Spyraflo, Inc.
404 Dividend Drive
Peachtree City, GA 30269
t. 800-487-7601
e. peterallen@spyraflo.com