Timken Bearings

May be that some have already heard this, but it news to me. Timken is closing up in the U.S. and moving overseas. There is a special on CNN Sunday night at 8PM. This could have a serious trickle down effect. Set up several machines for Tier 1 suppliers of Timken and worked with the Timken folks on PPAP testing. They were very exacting on quality. They may now have to be a little less stringent. Given the applications that those bearing are used in there could be some far reaching problems due to this move. Supply and quality are just a couple. Just curious what everyone else thinks about it.

What I think about it is unprintable in this forum. Timken Roller Bearings are a vital part of everything from automobiles to defense related stuff. Timken was the original patentee of the roller bearing (applying it to buggy axles). They developed special alloy steels for the bearings, have (or will soon have had) their own mills and pretty much "wrote the book" on roller bearings as well as the steels to make them. It seems as though something as vital and as essential to our everyday lives and commerce, let alone our defense, ought to be kept here in the USA. I guess it is the CEO's and MBA's playing their usual games, interested only int he bottom line and their bonuses and not giving a hang for the USA. They probably all ride around in BMW's or Mercedes Benz automobiles anyway. It's a sorry breed of human beings who populate the upper strata of corporate USA. No allegiance, no feelings for anyone or anything but their immediate needs which are likely status and the bottom line, inextricably intertwined.

As an aside, I had been hearing bits and pieces about Timken Roller Bearings coming in from Poland. These were used on heavy industrial applications. Supposedly, these bearings were a mixed bag as to quality- not getting the service life the US Made Timkens were giving. Early failures in service these bearings were designed for has been occurring. The word was to tell the bearing supply dealers to make sure to supply "US Made Timkens" when ordering roller bearings. Now, that may soon be a thing of the past. God alone knows how bad things will get when we start seeing Timkens made in China. My buddy and I were changing out axle bearings in our old BMW "Airhead" motorcycles. BMW used tapered roller bearings on the motorcycle axles. What we got to replace the bearings with were metric series Timkens- made in Italy. The old bearings in one bike were Timken of France and had lasted many miles and many years. Miked up the races to set preload and discovered there was a variance of a few thousandths end-to-end, so had to machine/lap a new axle spacer to get the preload right with the new Italian Timkens. If this is any indication of where things are going, it is not good. OTOH- Harley Davidson gave up using Timken Roller Bearings in the hubs/axles on the 2004 and 2005 bikes. H-D either saw the handwriting on the wall or decided to make things a little simpler (read: cheaper to build at the factory). H-D uses sealed angualr contact double row ball bearings assemblies in the hubs/axles on the new Hogs. I saw a replacement set and they were made by ********* of Canada. Maybe Harley figured using the traditional Timkens where preload was critical and which required repacking was a liability. Maybe Harley was already discovering that Timken's quality was slipping or that Timken was planning on taking things to China. I guess people needing high quality roller bearings may have to find a smaller manufacturer or perhaps a manufacturer in Western Europe who maintains close quality control. In any case, Timken's move stinks, in plain old American English.

I think that our present government ought to
put their foot down and prohibit timken from
moving their production overseas. As Joe
says it's just to vital an industry. I think
instead of 'foot down' they've got their 'hand
out' instead.

As far as BMW motorbike bearings goes, though,
I think you don't have to worry about your
(joe's) experience changing wheel bearings.
Bearing manufacturers cannot even now reliably
insure that a brand new set (from the _same_
manufacturer) will stack up with the same
spacers as an old set. So BMW has spacer
swapping as a regular feature when putting in
new wheel bearings.

A surface grinder makes this easy, but I also
do it with an internal expanding 5C collet
that's set up for the bore ID of the spacers.

The trick is to take *all* the grease out of
the bearings, assemble them in the hub (a spacer
for the axle is required here) and load them
up with the axle nut. Then put a good dial gage
on the axle and touch off on the hub. Push/pull
on the rim - straight in and out - to read the
TIR of clearance. Then cut the wedding ring
spacer down so that reads about a thou or maybe
a little less. The clearance will decrease as
the axle nut loads up the stack.

BMW sells the spacers in fairly wide increments,
so they're not trying to acheive zero clearance
on the stack. They're just trying to keep it
from going above 1 mm, or negative by 1 mm!

If for some reason the clearance is *negative*
when checked, one either needs a thicker wedding
ring, or needs to remove the OD spacer spool to
cut it down a few thou. This means heating the
hub to take the right-side outer race out. Never
drive the races out without heating the hub,
because you will eventually wind up having to
locktite them back in with the green bearing
retention compound.

Jim

Believe it or not Joe Michaels, Harley Davidson quit using the double timken bearing on the engines left mainshaft in 2003. This stupid move made the engines weak as 1954 models.

Don

Joe, your first paragraph sums up a lot of what I think about it, including the can't put it in this forum part.

There are also probably going to be a lot of small and mid-sized corps. that are going to suffer greatly by this move. I can think of a couple off the top of my head that most the eggs in there basket were Timken.

From an automotive stand point. It gets REAL expensive if you hold up an assy. line. Timken could be setting themselves up for a fall with this and the potential quality issues.

Seeing as the CEO of Timken is a "GOP Ranger" (and a close personal friend of the Shrub), I really doubt that you are going to see ANY action being taken against the company for shipping all those jobs overseas (except maybe some more tax breaks)!

http://www.counterpunch.org/brauchli06192004.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/18006

http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/03/12/edi03006.html

The Timken website says they are closing the Canton plant and moving most of the production from the Canton facility to other US facilities because the union would not agree to contract changes necessary needed to modernize the plant. I did not see anywhere that they are closing up and moving to China. This sounds like stubborn unions and has nothing to do with the Chinese.

INA has been doing business with HD for many years and is gaining more business from them each year.
http://www.engineeringtalk.com/news/ine/ine142.html

INA now owns *********/Barden so it's not surprising that ********* bearing are turning up in the motorcycles.

I had not heard where they were moving to. Only a blurb that the CEO had ststed it was too expensive to operate in the U.S. anymore. I have to work Sunday night but will have someone record the CNN special on it I am curious to see how it turns out.

Dave

Just a couple of thoughts, does Toyota use Timken?
Their reliability is very good so maybe the auto industry may not suffer as much as some are saying.

I agree that bearing makers should be a protected industry, during ww2 bearing factorys were an important target , as you all know the army runs on bearings.

The Japanese built aircraft engines under license to bmw (???) during ww2 but suffered short service life as the locally made balls were not finished to a high enough standard.

3 years ago Timken was a GW Bush sucess story, maybe the timing of this news is not a complete suprise.

The news I saw was from last May, so they may have decided in the meantime to move to China. I work for one of their competitors, it will be interesting to see what they do.

As much as I disdain the "bean counting" mentality, I'm convinced that those doing the counting would be leading the fight to keep manufacturing in the US if manufacturing here was as profitable as importing foreign-manufactured goods.

This link, http://www.theautochannel.com/F/news/2002/04/08/038442.html , gives some information on what may be driving Timken's changes. They are starting to relocate some of their plants to where their customers are. Nothing new with this, 30 years ago many plants in the Northeast and Midwest closed to move down south to stay close to their customers and reduce their costs, 15 years ago many of those southern plants moved to Mexico, now its time to move to China.

What needs to be remembered though, is that most of the bearings made in China will be used in China in cars or machines built for the Chinese, not for export to the US.

Harley went to ball bearings in the wheels of all models beginning with the 2000 model year. My guess would be it lowered assembly costs and skill level required, since you now just press the bearings into the bores and the spacing is set by a single tube with no shims required. Also, in the long standing tradition of the MoCo, the change created a captive market for replacement bearing sales, since the bearing they use has a non-standard ID of either .750" or 1" depending on the model, but still carries metric dimensions on the OD and width. The tapered rollers they formerly used were a dirt common variation of LM's and it probably got harder to sell a lot of those at their standard 1000% markup. When your annual production uses a million plus of the same bearing, a "special" is probably not any more expensive than the metric equivalent standard would be, so if you can decrease assembly costs and simultaneously create a locked market for overpriced replacements, you've just hit on the perfect reason for H-D to make a production change. FWIW, this "Buy American" motorcycle rides on wheels cast and machined in Australia, turning on bearings made in Canada by a German company, braked by Japanese discs and rotors, and steered by a Japanese front end. Never fear though, since the steel tube bearing spacer does carry Made in USA markings, at least on the ones where the mill markings are readable.

The assembled length of a cup and cone has never been held to real close tolerance (as bearing tolerances go), and that's one of the things that helps keep them cheap to produce. If you ever run into an application that requires a matched pair of tapered rollers where the assembled length is held closely to a specific dimension, the price for this pair will be more than 5 times the cost of the same pair of production bearings, or at least that's what I've found to be the case when I've run into any of the ones whose numbers indicated that special feature.

Lots of mobile home axles have used Chinese tapered rollers for quite a while. Their mean life appears to be about one trip from factory to final resting place....and that destination better not be too far from the plant. Before the Chinese bearings, they used a lot of Israeli bearings, and they were junk too.

Ya know, everybody says the quality will go down when the manufacturing goes overseas. And I'm sure it does. But did anyone ever hear of a company moving back to the U.S. after experiencing quality issues from being in other countries?
Somehow, these companies must work through the quality issues because the companies never seem to come back. Either that or the product becomes so cheap, people accept the poorer quality. Either way, it's pretty sad.

stanko
Member # 3378 posted 11-20-2004 04:00 PM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just a couple of thoughts, does Toyota use Timken?
Their reliability is very good so maybe the auto industry may not suffer as much as some are saying.

Click to expand...

Not sure about Toyota but I have only ever found Nachi or NTN bearings fitted as original equipment in Japanese motorcycles, I am fairly certain that this includes certain Kawasaki & Honda models manufactured in the USA. A quick web search reveals that both companies have manufacturing facilities in Japan, USA, Canada, UK, Europe & China / far east.
It would seem that these companies have established manufacturing facilities in the various countries proportional to the local market, and this obviously includes China. Maybe Timken are simply, and perhaps even belatedly, establishing manufacturing facilities in other countries proportional to the present & future market for their product.

regards

Brian

Brian hit on the reason Timken needs to have a manufacturing presence in China, it is becoming the largest market and any company not manufacturing there will find their market share shrink. SKF already has 5 plants in China, if Timken or anyone else for that matter does not manufacture where their customers are and at a price point the customers can spend, then they will loose business to companies that will do that.

The reason Timken needs to move is to survive. As other bearing makers move to China for the wage and tax breaks, Timken has no choice.

As I posted elsewhere, imports now control 15.5% of the U.S. economy but only have to pay 1% of the taxes. As more and more manufacturers leave this country, that increases the tax burden on those remaining. To compete against companies that get a 15 to 1 tax break ratio, not to mention a wage advantage of over 20 to 1, the choice is move or go bankrupt.

And the devastation to those left in America is gowing by leaps and bounds. In 1913, we had zero income tax. Today, as the industrial and tariff revenues go to historic lows, the citizens are getting caught with a larger and larger percentage of the tax burden. Before 1913, income tax was 0% of the federal revenue. Today, personal income taxes pay 49% of the federal budget while corporate income taxes pay 10% of the burden. And on top of that, Americans are losing their jobs.

It is a catastrophe in the making.


Steve

I heard about a year back that they were closing all plants worldwide and shifting production to one massive plant in China,keeping only sales offices open in each country.I think most of the British plants have closed.
regards,Mark.

part of what drives manuf. offshore is our own subsidies for offshoring jobs. Like this:

First....

There was a great Discovery epoisode recently on Long Beach port. How efficient they were & such. As was pointed out, that is $38B in and $3B out.

The port facilities are paid for directly and indirectly with tax dollars. So we subsidize this net import policy. The argument is made that you can do down the road to Mexico and pay about 1/4 of the per container offload fees. That is why we have to "subsidize" the port.

So why not quadruple the container off load cost to more accurately reflect the cost? why are tax payers subsidizing the offshoring of jobs here/

Second.........

On the way back from AZ recently, I came through El Paso. It was one long train after another. Heavy, heavy rail traffic. Containers riding on flatcars. Lots of them Hanjin. The names are on the boxes, as you know. So lets see... We subsidize the railroads, subsidize the flatcar fleet (some are wanting the DOD to shell out $500 M to upgrade the flatcar fleet), so why is it: That on the way to the Walmart Warehouse ( could be Kmart/Sears - Home Depot, Lowes, Target), every step of the way, there is a government subsidy helping jobs to be offshored?

Couldn't we just start by eliminating the subsidy? Pay your full ticket?

Don't think some companies would like that. I see it as a positive step to start with.

--jr

Rumors are interesting in that they are hardly ever correct. You can read a thorough statement by Timken about the status of the company and plant closing here.

http://www.ebearing.com/news2004/102901.htm

The opinion piece by ebearing on all the uproar of the Canton plant is also interesting.

http://www.ebearing.com/news2004/051702.htm