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New Bearings Reduce Maintenance Costs for Sapphire
The economics of maintaining the tyre shredding machines operated by Sapphire Energy Recovery have reportedly been transformed by the employment of an adapter-mounted ball bearing system provided by East Midlands company Bearing Transmission & Pneumatics (BTP). Switching to a BTP supplied Dodge Grip Tight bearing, which features a flinger seal and a built-in mechanism for removing the bearing from the shaft, is said to have completely resolved a recurrent - and expensive - repair problem.
The high-throughput shredding machines operated by Sapphire in four UK locations convert end-of-life car and van tyres into rubber chips that are then used as an alternative to coal in cement manufacture. After shredding, the tyre chips are graded for size by a classifier with 36 sets of bearings.
Due to contact with fine metal wires contained within the tyres and the water used for cooling during the process, damage was occurring to the classifier shafts' set-screw style bearings. As a result they had a typical working life of less than six months. Changing the classifier bearings could then take anything up to two hours per bearing, depending on the problems encountered and the skill of the operators. The presence of corrosion sometimes meant that the bearings needed to be loosened by heat, for example, and in some cases the whole shaft needed to be replaced.
| Product Model | Inside Diameter | Outside Diameter | Thickness |
| 4453 bearing | 123.825 | 180.98 | 41.28 |
| 4452 bearing | 120.65 | 177.8 | 41.28 |