A success story for US-based Dodge Industrial, reducing downtime and costs for customers in the forest product industry with roller bearings.
Dodge Industrial, an RBC company, were faced with an industry challenge with dry kiln fans and the costly downtime caused by lengthy maintenance solutions. To solve this issue for their customer base in the United States of America, Dodge provided a Safety Mount™ solution in the form of mounted spherical roller bearings.
A top manufacturer of lumber products in the United States, owning approximately 1.8 million acres of timberland and operating multiple sawmills and plywood mills, was experiencing costly unplanned downtime when the SAF-style bearings on their dry kiln fans failed.
One of their lumber mills in Warren, Arkansas processes 220 million board feet per year of southern yellow pine. Once received at the mill, logs are debarked, cut to length, cut down to boards, edged, trimmed, sorted, and stacked in preparation for the dry kiln process. The dry kiln process, essential to wood production, dries the wood boards by circulating hot air through a chamber via large, forced draft fans.
The fans used a Dodge competitor’s 4-15/16-inch SAF-style bearings, requiring two skilled maintenance workers, six hours of labour, and exact measurements using specialty tools for installation. In this harsh application, unplanned downtime due to bearing failure was occurring once per year and cost the manufacturer $40,800 per hour in production value.
The success
After testing the Dodge Safety Mount’s easy installation and reliable operation, the customer’s plant management decided to standardise their facility on Safety Mount, resulting in an average annual saving of $163,018.
4x faster installation than the competition
Minimise tools, risk, and time to maximise reliability, uptime, and savings.
The test
Due to continued failures, lengthy installations, and critical uptime requirements in the mill, plant management tested two Safety Mount bearings on one of the fans in their drying kiln.
The results
As a drop-in replacement to the existing bearing, Safety Mount’s seamless installation of two hours versus the competitor’s six hours of downtime immediately impressed plant management. Without factoring in the increased reliability of the pre-lubricated Dodge® product, the valuable time savings for increased uptime and the impact on future productivity led them to standardise the mill on Safety Mount.
The why
Shaft-ready out of the box, Safety Mount is a drop-in replacement for SAF-style bearings and features an innovative design with unparalleled advantages over the competition. Its patented dual lock nut eliminates the need for feeler gauges, subjective measurements, and manual calculations, resulting in immediate time savings and improving operational reliability. The patented lock plate utilises a single-bolt securement mechanism for 360-degree placement options with no hammering for a faster and safer installation. Built to revolutionise mounted spherical roller bearing installations, Safety Mount is the premier problem solver for critical applications.
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