As one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies, a North American manufacturer runs 21 manufacturing plants across the country—relying heavily on mechanical power transmission products to keep operations moving smoothly and efficiently.

Widely used in a variety of construction applications, oriented strand board (OSB) is a leading building material known for its cost-effectiveness and sustainability. OSB production starts with trees as raw material, moving them through a process of debarking, chipping, drying, filtering, blending, pressing, and trimming to produce finished panels. Critical to this process is the drying phase, in which wet wood chips are fed into rotary drum dryers and continually agitated as hot air is circulated throughout the drum.

At an OSB plant in the southeast, the eight-inch bore, SAF-style bearings on the rotary drum dryers were regularly failing. Each failure required a 2-day replacement using a crane to support the dryer, costing $26,700 in labor and materials. With a total of 24 bearings on dryers across the mill, four were being replaced per year—resulting in a total annual cost of $106,800.