What you should know about counterfeit, reconditioned and tampered bearings
The supply of reconditioned and spurious (non-genuine, remarked bearings) has long existed in the Philippines. The purpose of this section is to assist the enduser to identify these bearing products. Various inspections of enduser warehouses confirm that these bearing are widely supplied, but the user should be made aware of the consequences of installing and using such products. There is little doubt that the use of these products by endusers (mostly unknowingly) cost the Philippine industry many millions. This is natural as bearings are the rotating part of machinery, and if these bearings fail prematurely, it will result in unplanned downtime, and many instances, consequential damages to other parts of the machinery. Research shows that over a third of all production or maintenance stoppages relate to rotating machinery. The results are even more pronounced in industries where condition monitoring is not yet a common practice.
From the outset, it must be kept in mind that the manufacture of bearings is a high precision, high-tech process dealing with the very close tolerances.
Some examples of the cost of premature bearing failure to Philippine industry (Case Studies)
1. Bearings needed to be replaced on an 810 kw electric motor for a dryer exhaust fan of a granulation plant. This is a critical application. Changeover time of the bearing only takes four (4) hours, the whole process i.e. bringing the motor down, fitting, checking and getting it back into place takes 48 hours. Should failure occur, the company will lose 48 hours in production. At 65 tons per hour and US$200 per ton, this cost amounts to US$624,000 or Php17,000,000! Fortunately, the faulty bearings (which we suspected to be reconditioned) were discovered but only after mounting. However, valuable time was lost in order to find replacement bearings.
2. In another case, a company spent approximately Php2,000,000 per year on bearing replacement. The plant operates continuously for twenty-four (24) hours. Plant efficiency is fairly high but the downtime due to mechanical failure equaled approximately Php30,000,000 in 1991. The plant manager attributes 25% of this cost to bearing failures which means that bearing related downtime equaled approximately Php8,500,000!
Reconditioned and spurious bearings were discovered in their inventory, and is a contributing factor to the above cost.
The supply of reconditioned, fake and tampered bearing occur in various brands. The rules for detection described here can be applied to most brands. However, there may be slight design variations even if the bearing has the same number. Please refer to us if you have doubts. |
