For design engineers and purchasing
agents alike, bearings can sometimes
be like family. Oh, you know—can’t
live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
In other words, bearings are vital,
problematic components used in both
the simplest and most sophisticated
gear systems. If it has gears, it has bearings.
So it is important to know whether
that shipment of new bearings about
to arrive and to be incorporated into
the gearboxes you are assembling is in
top-notch order.
That is where a company like Olean,
NY-based Napoleon Engineering Services
(NES) steps up to make that happen.
In fact, when it comes to bearings,
they make a lot of things happen.
“Actually, as the largest independent
bearing inspection and testing facility
in North America, we see just about
everything,” claims Chris Napoleon,
company president, founder and chief
engineer. “We also have another aspect
of NES that enhances our knowledge
base—we also manufacture custom
bearings. As a small custom bearing
manufacturing facility, we are on the
ground floor with the necessary flexibility
to incorporate some of the latest
technology in bearing design and
manufacturing. If we’re not making
specialty bearings for industrial and
aerospace OEMs, then we are testing
bearings for the bearing manufacturers
and feeding “proprietary” test data
to their application engineers and
research scientists with information
about some of the design advancements
they are working on.”
And the OEMs Napoleon refers to
are high on the food chain—GM and
John Deere are two of them.
Despite the importance of the work,
the manufacturing protocols of bearing
inspection and testing, while easily
as important as any other, do not seem
to draw much trade press love. Is it all
about the gears?

Napoleon responds that, “Historically,
many gearbox and transmission
OEMs also manufactured their own
gears. As a result, they were in complete
control of (and responsible
for) overall gear design.
That is not always the case
with bearings. NES was once
told by a major transmission
manufacturer, ‘We can go anywhere
in the world to manufacture
our gears because we
know everything about them.’
They also have the in-house
capability to test the gears and
determine whether a new supplier
or design
is effective.