Over time, the pattern used to create castings for this turbine bearing began to wear out. The quality of castings provided by the foundry had continually degraded. Porosity as well as mis-shaped features became common. The customer was faced not only with the high cost of new patterns, they also had limited documentation on their old pattern design. Even if they did re-create their patterns, the quality deficiencies of sand castings no longer met today’s expectations in some of their customers’ eyes.
Using the knowledge gained from years of experience manufacturing several hundred unique bearings, we proposed a new design made from bar stock. Impressed with the quality of our design, our customer approved our proposal as is. We now provide our happy customer a reliable source of bearings produced to a consistently high level quality at a significantly reduced lead time.