Accroding to your experience which bearing (Brand)have highest service life. What you think who is a best bearing manufacture in the world?

The one whose bearings are selected, installed, aligned and maintained the best are the best in the world.

Phoo, if you have a bearing in mind you can calculate the life rating, often called "L-10" life. The L-10 life is the number of hours in service that 90% of a large population of apparently-identical bearings will survive when subjected to the boundary conditions (load, speed, lubrication, material and cleanliness) that are specific to the application. Stated another way, 10% of that population will have failed in the L-10 number of service hours.

Most rolling element bearing manufacturers publish detailed life-load analysis procedures. The bearing life calculations which the manufacturers publish take into account factors including:

applied radial load,
applied thrust load,
RPM,
pitchline velocity,
lubricant viscosity,
contamination,
bearing load ratings, and
desired probability of survival (failure rate).

All of these are important factors but as Danny has pointed out you often have control on the most important factors; mounting, lubricant viscosity and cleanliness.

John from PA

At our plant, we use more SKF bearings than other brands. I cannot recall any problems traced to the bearings other than one that had been stored on the warehouse shelf for 25 years (not an SKF).

I have heard some on this board say that Link Belt bearings tend to generate fault frequencies immediately after installation.

I know motor repair shops pay very close attention to the bearings. A small percentage of bearings don't meet ID or OD dimensional tolerances. A small percentage of bearings show fault frequencies during test run after install and this is sometimes blamed on the bearings. I think each motor repair shop has their favorites. One of our local motor repair shops is not keen on SKF bearings, but likes NTN bearings.

Remember, some of this is 2nd hand information to me, and I'm just an anonymous guy on the internet, so please take it with a grain of salt.

In addition: if SKF just opened a new plant or FAG, or --- you will find that the first month's productions are of super high quality and almost all are ABEC 9 or close.

So, if you are wanting to go with the best of the best: go with top icons with new plants and order bearings from that specific location. Due to the precision of bearings and the materials they are made from; a bearing's plant machine life is relative short.

Pete,

Speaking for myself, Linkbelt bearings have inherently high floor levels and random high frequency energy in the twf's.

I have not documented any shorter life because of it and hope to find an explanation before I die.

Phoo, bearings that vibrate a little bit !!!
Arie Mol

Thanks for all input.
One time we got offten bearing failure but no vibration data collected for this bearing then took new bearing from warehouse, cut to see inside found surface of inner ring not smooth like finish surface by lath machine instead of finish surface by griding machine.

Phoo

If you are talking about the arc patterns on the raceway in your description "finish surface by lath machine" then don't automatically assume this is bad.

SKF for example make sure by design that the outer race rolling surface is not perfectly smooth since it provides lubrication adhesion and bearings last much longer!!!

As long as you stick to the renowned bearing manufacturers like SKF you can't go wrong. Heresay has it that you should avoid Chinese bearings.

You have to remember that more than 90% of bearings don't reach their L10 life for reasons other than to do with manufacture. Lubrication problem, bad install, corrosion etc. etc. Rgds,

I was once told that some of the more obscure bearing manufacturers don't necessarily have their own manufacturing facilities. They look for spare capacity in any facility available and place an order. This means that you don't necessarily get consistency of material, surface finish, etc. In short you get variable quality.

It doesn't surprise me to see that SKF has been mentioned several times already without anyone having a bad word to say about them. Perhaps that is the answer you are looking for.

In my opinion, SKF and FAG have the best reputations for quality. Timken also but they have a narrower offering.

This is based solely on reputation and personal experience and not any kind of empirical data.

SKF undoubtedly are the best. whatever failures we have observed till date in these bearings, are the result of poor maintenance practices.