A top manufacturer of lumber products in the United States, owning approximately 1.8 million acres of timberland and operating multiple sawmills and plywood mills, was experiencing costly unplanned downtime when the SAF-style bearings on their dry kiln fans failed.

One of their lumber mills in Warren, Arkansas processes 220 million board feet per year of southern yellow pine. once received at the mill, logs are debarked, cut to length, cut down to boards, edged, trimmed, sorted, and stacked in preparation for the dry kiln processes. The dry kiln process, essential to wood production, dries the wood boards by circulating hot air through a chamber via large forced draft fans.

The fans used a competitor’s 4-15/16 inch SAF-style bearings, requiring two skilled maintenance workers, six hours of labor, and exact measurements using specialty tools for installation. In this harsh application, unplanned downtime due to bearing failure was occurring once per year and cost the manufacturer $40,800 per hour in production value.