The Dudley 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. However, recently there has been a significant increase in demand for larger bearings up to 1200 mm 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.

In May 2021, to enable the inspection of these larger bearings, Timken purchased an LK AlteraM 15.12.10 ceramic bridge CMM with axis travels of 1500 x 1200 x 1000 mm. Assisting further in the company’s quality control department is a Mitutoyo CMM capable of measuring ball and roller bearings with bores up to 800 mm in diameter. At the same time, LK upgraded this machine 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.

It is necessary to check dozens of high-precision geometrical features on each bearing to ensure that flatness, circularity, radial run-out and track width meet specified tolerances, some of which are within ±6 µm. Timken achieves this quickly, repeatably and automatically on the CMMs in computer-controlled cycle times of around 10 minutes.

William Hayes, quality improvement engineer at the Dudley factory, says: “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 our Mitutoyo BN710 CMM with new control software, as we need two measuring machines to cope with our increasing production throughput.

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