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.