Turbomolecular pumps, or turbo pumps, are serious business. Their rotors spin at incredible speeds, sucking powerfully enough to create a high vacuum. Whether your turbomolecular pump generates vacuums to run an electron microscope or enable thin film deposition for computer chips or solar panels, you’ll need specialized, super-high-quality bearings to run it safely and consistently. […]

If you’ve searched for bearings online, you’ve likely come across product descriptions boasting about meeting ANSI, ISO, or ASTM standards. You know the standards are a sign of quality – but who came up with them, and what do they mean? Technical standards help both manufacturers and buyers. Manufacturers use them to make and test […]

As part of our Bearings 101 series of informational articles, we’re highlighting types of bearings or bearing components. Next on the agenda are airframe control needle and roller bearings.  Regardless of the application, you always want a bearing to be sturdy and reliable. But when it comes to components for aircraft, the margin for error […]

As part of our Bearings 101 series of informational articles, we’re highlighting types of bearings or bearing components. The latest subject of our attention is miniature and instrument bearings. What’s teeny tiny and goes really fast? It’s not the wasp dive-bombing your soda on a hot day…it’s miniature and instrument bearings! Miniature bearings are any […]

Photo by Donald Giannatti As part of our Bearings 101 series of informational articles, we’re highlighting types of bearings or bearing components. Today’s article is all about thin section bearings.  The elegant thin section bearing might look dainty, but don’t let its slender proportions fool you. The thin section bearing punches above its weight while […]

Photo by Sebastien van de Walle As part of our Bearings 101 series of informational articles, we’re highlighting types of bearings or bearing components. For this edition, we’re looking at roller bearings. Let the good times roll!   Despite the name, you won’t find roller bearings in roller skates. Instead, roller bearings show up in places […]

As part of our Bearings 101 series of informational articles, we’re highlighting types of bearings or bearing components. In this article, we present Thinex and torque tube bearings. No, Thinex and Torque is not the name of The Three Stooges’ law firm. That was Dewey Cheatem & Howe. If deep groove bearings are the workhorses of the […]

We’ve put together a series of informational articles to highlight bearing types, terminology, and components. In this segment of Bearings 101, we focus on machine tool spindle bearings. In this complex universe, there are profound questions with answers that elude us. Why do we exist? Are there other worlds beyond ours? What are machine tool […]

Another kind of groove. As part of our Bearings 101 series of informational articles, we’ve decided to highlight types of bearings or bearing components. This time, we turn the spotlight on deep groove bearings. Contrary to popular belief, Deep Groove Bearings did not back up Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Deep groove bearings are the workhorses […]

We’ve started a feature on the Alpine Bearing site. We call it Bearings 101 and in it, we’ll post technical articles about, you guessed it, bearings. Some will be basic, others, more complex.  We hope you learn something you didn’t know or can use this column as a resource. Think of us when describing a […]