In 1898, Henry Timken, a carriage-maker from St. Louis was awarded a patent for the tapered roller bearing, which kick-started his carriage making business into success. Tapered roller bearings revolutionized wheel axes in the late 19th century after the technology had remained the same for centuries. Timken was able to reduce the friction on his bearings, compared to other bearing designs at the time, by using a cup and cone design using tapered bearings which actually rolled, which reduced the load placed on the bearings by distributing the weight and load evenly across the cups, cones, and bearings.

Pairs of tapered roller bearings are used in car and vehicle wheel bearings where they must cope at the same time with large vertical (radial) and horizontal (axial) forces. Tapered roller bearings are commonly used for moderate speed, heavy duty applications where durability is required. Common applications are in agriculture, construction and mining equipment, axle systems, gear box, engine motors and reducers.

Here at Lost Your Bearings, we aim to stock a wide variety of different sizes of Taper Roller Bearings so that we can best accommodate your needs. If you have any questions or queries about tapered roller bearings, or about any of our products then please do not hesitate to contact us at info@lostyourbearings.com, where a trained member of our team will be there to answer all your questions.

The way that the loads are distributed between the two areas determines what angle the bearing will sit at, which is typically in between the range of 10° and 45°. The higher the axial load is, the lower the radial load will be, and vice versa. During high speed applications, such as jet engines and dentistry, the centrifugal force that are created by the balls of the bearing changes the contact angle at both the inner and outer race. Ceramics such as silicon nitride are now regularly used in such applications due to their low density, which is roughly 40% that of steel. These ceramics are added because they function well in high temperature situations, as well as drastically reducing centrifugal force, they are also just as durable as steel so there is no loss in product quality when ceramics are used.

Angular contact bearings are probably the most common kind of ball bearing that you will see, this is due to their versatility, as they can be used in almost and situation and they can adapt if their job is changed. This is convenient for the user because it means that changes can be made, without disturbing the bearing.

The first fluid film thrust bearings were created by George Michell, and Australian engineer, and were patented in 1905. His first incarnations were simply a number of sector-shaped pads, arranged in a circle around the shaft, and which are free to pivot. These create wedge-shaped regions of oil inside the bearing between the pads and a rotating disk, which support the applied thrust and eliminate metal-on-metal contact.

Thrust bearings come in several varieties.

- Ball thrust bearings, composed of ball bearings supported in a ring, normally used for low thrust applications with little radial load.

- Tapered roller bearings consist of small tapered rollers arranged so that their axes meet at a point on the axis of the bearing. The length of the roller and the diameter of the ends and the angle of rollers need to be carefully measured to give the correct taper so that each end of the roller rolls smoothly on the bearing without skidding. These are the type most used in the automotive industry (to support the wheels of a car for example), where they are used in pairs to accommodate axial thrust in either direction, as well as radial loads. They can support larger thrust loads than ball bearings due to the larger contact area, but are more costly to make.

- Roller thrust bearings are composed of small cylindrical rollers placed flat with their axes pointing to the axis of the bearing. They give good carrying capacity and are cheap, but tend to wear due to differences in radial speed and friction is higher than with ball bearings.

- Fluid bearings, where the axial thrust is supported on a thin layer of pressurized liquid   these give low drag.

-Magnetic bearings, where axial thrust is supported on a magnetic field. This is used where very high speeds or very low drag is needed.

We are proud to offer a wide variety of brands in our product lines at LostYourBearings, as well as offering a wide selection of products within each brand category. Just a small selection of the brands which we stock are: NKE, NTN, SKY, KOYO, RHP and FAG. We are committed to offering our customers the very best prices possible and as such, are confident in offering the very best deals across our categories.

Alongside our selections of ball bearings, taper bearings and roller bearings, we also stock a variety of products including a selection of Wedge, Vee and timing belts. Vee belts are the standard in almost any belt power transmission, timing belts are those which you see on a car’s cam shaft and the wedge belt is very similar to the Vee, but is used in more demanding drive systems.

Our other stock includes a selection of pulleys including wedge, vee and timing styles, which are in essence the same as their belt counterparts that share the same names, as well a range of specialised motorbike bearings which are often hard to find or otherwise unobtainable elsewhere.

Please take a few minutes to take a look around our website and keep checking back for our regular blog updates and feel free to contact us with any questions you may have at info@lostyourbearings.co.uk.