Customer Requirements
One of our fellow Yorkshire-based customers was looking for replacement bushes for a set of cutless-type bearings in a submersible pump.
Cutless bearings are an off-the-shelf bearing option used in marine and pump applications.
Typically, they have a bronze or other metallic shell with rubber inserts.
Gaps between these inserts form grooves for fluid to pass through the bearings.
Over time the rubber wears away and eventually the bearings need replacing.
The Tufcot Solution
Usually, in these cases, we would replace the whole bearing with a single piece Tufcot® bearing with machined grooves but, on this occasion, the customer asked to retain the bronze and steel outers and replace the worn rubber liners with Tufcot®.
Once they had been removed from the pump, the customer sent the cutless bearings to Tufcot. We machined away the old rubber liner material which had hardened and started to perish with age and repeated heat cycles.
The outers were all slightly different diameters, so we measured them on our CMM (coordinate measuring machine) in order to machine four new bespoke liners in Tufcot® T100 Marine. These new liners were then pressed into the outers using our flypress.
Once back with the customer, the bearing assemblies were fitted into the motor housings.
This wet wound motor drives a large submersible pump and, in operation, the Tufcot® bearings will run hydrodynamically; lubricated and cooled by the fluid being pumped.
