When a Rolex knock-off one day disassembles on its owner’s wrist — caveat emptor, you get what you pay for. And when — say Walmart — gets stuck with a counterfeit $50 bill, it is duly noted and life goes on. But when a counterfeit bearing finds its way into the guts of a piece of heavy machinery, or a medical device, or a production line — the ramifications can be significant, if not deadly. Bearings are much like gears — they’re everywhere. Which ups the ante that there exist numerous applications possibilities for counterfeit bearings to impact performance and outcome. Consider the potential result of bearing failure in a high-balling locomotive; or a surgical tool used for brain surgery; or in a heavy-duty crane operating in the heart of Manhattan. Indeed, when speaking of counterfeit bearings, the you-get-what-you-pay-for bromide couldn’t be more accurate.

About now, however, you might be asking yourself — when was the last time I actually heard of counterfeit bearings being responsible for a severe accident? Well, you won’t hear about it in the mainstream news media, but documented mishaps do indeed occur.

Steel mill discovers 1,000 counterfeits

On suspicion that a non-authorized dealer had supplied them with a large quantity of counterfeit SKF bearings, mill management asked SKF to conduct an inspection. The mill reported that after two to three hours of operation, the replacement bearings were performing so poorly that the mill’s maintenance team was forced to shut down the machinery, dismount the bearings, and remount the older bearings. After inspecting more than 1,000 suspect bearings, SKF technicians concluded that they were in fact counterfeit, thereby helping the mill keep a costly mistake from becoming even more expensive.

Unplanned shutdown at petrochemical plant

For one unfortunate petrochemical processor, it took an emergency shutdown to reveal that it was being supplied with counterfeit SKF bearings. Following just two days of operation, one of these bearings failed in a crucial application, forcing the costly, unplanned shutdown. After a complete analysis, SKF confirmed that the bearings were counterfeit. In cooperation with an SKF authorized distributor, the counterfeits were quickly replaced with genuine components.

Marine vessel finds repairs almost worse than problem

After only 14 hours of continuous operation, a generator on-board a marine vessel began experiencing such extreme vibration that it had to be shut down. As the generator had just undergone repairs, the crew was immediately suspicious. Fearing the worst, the vessel’s maintenance team removed the suspect bearing and sent it to SKF for a rigorous bearing failure analysis. SKF confirmed that the bearing was counterfeit, which nearly caused the “repairs” to be worse than the original problem.

Commenting on the above, Christopher Napoleon, president/chief engineer of Napoleon Engineering Services, says that “For most industrial applications the greatest concern is loss of equipment uptime and the loss of revenue while maintenance crews diagnose the problem and repair the equipment. For the end user, that is typically the greatest risk. There are always the concerns about personal injury, but I suspect they are relatively small in number compared to reduced bearing life and loss of return on investment due to poor performance.”

So given an absence of severe injuries or fatalities due to counterfeit bearings, this is one occasion where “it’s all about the money” is relatively good, if not incredible news — especially when you consider that it took only some defective o-rings to bring down NASA’s Challenger space shuttle, killing all seven crew members.

How difficult is it to identify counterfeit bearings? It would seem learning to do so can’t be that complicated — or is it?

“It’s oftentimes quite difficult to identify a counterfeit bearing,” says Napoleon. “The quality level of some of the plants that are engaged in counterfeit production can be outstanding. I’ve seen product that is equal to, or better than, the original manufacturer, but the internal design was different,” proving that the product was counterfeit. “It’s not always that the quality is poor,” he continues, “It could be a different grade of steel or different design intention that separates a counterfeit bearing from the brand name. Bearings are actually very complicated and there are many attributes that can identify separate suppliers. However, if someone is intent on counterfeiting a major brand name, and they work hard at reverse engineering the bearing design, manufacturing practices, marking, packaging, etc., it can often be difficult to identify the knock-off version.”

“Counterfeit bearings are very difficult to identify and it requires a trained expert to do so,” seconds Tina ?str?m, SKF director group marketing, communication & brand protection. “The counterfeits have a very high level of resemblance to genuine product, where the most obvious visual features are copied, such as colors and logo types.” But just as with “nice” packaging, a “nice” looking bearing “is no guarantee that it is genuine.” ?tr?m points out that “SKF offers our customers a verification support through the SKF Authenticate app, where SKF experts will verify authenticity for them within 24 hours. The best way to safeguard authenticity is to buy from distributors authorized by SKF