WOODEX Bearing Company, Inc.
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WOODEX® Oil-impregnated Wood Bearings

 

Inventing the Wheel The History of Wood Bearings

The old caveman cartoons notwithstanding, Wood is arguably the oldest bearing material on the planet - in continuous use since the invention of the wheel. In fact the first known wheel was several planks of wood, fastened together crosswise, then rounded on the perimeter. (The stone double-wheel, pictured at right, was less than successful for a variety of reasons.)

Warriors in ancient Rome drove chariots with wooden bearings lubricated with animal fat; Marie Antoinette would have ridden to her untimely end in a cart whose axles were born in wood. Bearings made of lignum vitae bore the rudder shafts of ships in the golden age of sail, and when the steamship rose to power, its propellor shaft spun in lig bearings, too.

Despite Isaac Babbitt's invention of a revolutionary metal bearing alloy in 1839, wood remained popular, and continues to this day to be the most "shaft-kindly" bearing material available. Even the latest engineering plastics fail to protect metal shafts as well as wood. There are innumerable historic examples of wood bearing use, only a few of which we've mentioned here.

making bearings Even long after metal, rolling-element bearings became the de facto standard for industrial machinery, wood has continued to be used as the bearing of choice for a great many machines. Woodex still receives calls from folks looking for replacement bearings for their old, Sears snowthrowers, or for old farm implements. We've built replacement bearings for the water wheel in a nineteenth-century grain mill, and we're often asked to make replacement bearings for hydroelectric turbines. We've applied our standard wood spherical pillow block bearings to an aesthetically-pleasing Micro Hydro installation in Ireland. We've even made bearings for a modern, floating-arm trebuchet built by East Coast Catapults - a team of engineering students at McGill University. You can see it in operation here:  Treb Movie filmed at the Canadian Wood Council's First Annual Engineering Competition in 2004, at Carlton University in Ottowa.

Wood is a fairly rugged material for low-speed, low load applications, and in many cases it's possible for a user in a remote location to fabricate a rough and ready bearing on site that will last many months or even years. Because of it's near-universal availability and ease of shaping, wood is gaining new favor in third world countries where metal bearings can be prohibitively expensive.
Guaiacum Coulteri

While Woodex still builds the occasional lignum vitae bearing for water-immersed applications, this extremely dense (it won't float), slow-growing hardwood has been lumbered off. Though not extinct, the trees take three to four hundred years to mature, and only small cross sections of the wood are available. Woodex occasionally makes jackstaff halyard bearings from this material for U.S. Navy submarines. For those curious about lignum vitae, Woodex uses a species called, Guaiacum Coulteri. This wood has a beautiful blue Flower.

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WOODEX Bearing Company, Inc. 216 Bay Point Road, Georgetown, ME 04548 USA
800 526 8800 toll-free in North America or +1 207 371 2210 Fax: +1 207 371 2169