Problem
Gangway manufacturer Aluminum Ladder Company considers Spyraflo to be its “go-to” bearing company. Aluminum Ladder’s most recent challenge involved gangways used for unloading barges and ships on the Great Lakes, where brackish water was corroding the existing bearings and cracking the cast housings. When the gangways didn’t work, the ships couldn’t be unloaded. The repair costs and downtime were untenable.
Solution
Because Spyraflo has the resources and engineering expertise to address these types of challenges, designing a bearing for this application was right up our alley. The solution to this problem was a custom, self-aligning bronze composite bearing — specifically, a 1¾”-diameter PTFE-composite bronze, +/-10° self-aligning bearing mounted in a 5¼” square yellow zinc-plated, 4-bolt hole heavy-duty steel flange with a load-carrying capacity of 25,000 pounds. To start, we produced just a few of these high-value bearings, but the customer has used many more of them in subsequent projects.