lighting

The journey to lighting innovation

Coolon LED Lighting has invested heavily in research and development to provide the most impactful industrial lighting products to the Australian market. Billy Friend sits down with founders Alex and Svetlana Zatsepin about the ethos of the company and its continued expansion mission.
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couplings

Quick-flex couplings ready to rock

In mining, quarrying and extractive industries, ball mills are the most common grinding machine and certainly an interesting piece of engineering ingenuity, according to Eddie Lawrence. 
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software

Driving longevity with Gates® software tool

A quarry or mining plant potentially has hundreds of different belt drives. How can a site or reliability manager ensure belts are achieving their life expectancy and that drives are working at optimal efficiency? According to Steve Hittmann, the Gates® Design Flex™ Pro™ free software tool is designed exactly for this purpose, providing real cost savings and benefits to customers.
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belt

Tightening the belt: Continuous improvement for the earth moving sector

Behind every great piece of equipment is a good belt. The humble belt is the understated essential worker of industry, says CBC’s power transmission expert Steve Hittmann. In a refinery or processing plant, failure of a belt can cause unnecessary downtime. This is precisely why manufacturers like Gates® invest their efforts into the research and development of increasingly high-performance belt technology. Gates® is a premium partner in distribution with CBC, so innovations in belt technology are Steve’s business. The Gates® PowerGrip™ GT4™ is the latest in materials science for belt design. Steve explains, “The chemical composition of the GT4™ belt is excellent for torque and tension. The belt is made from ethylene-propylene elastomer rubber (EPR) which is resistant to heat, oxidation, weather, brake fluids, oils and greases. In addition to this, it has a fiberglass layer with tensile cords to reduce the amount of stretch.” “The GT4™ belts are designed around 25,000 hours of life which is the premium standard Gates® maintains with their products. This means a minimum of 3 years of service life. However, I have seen these belts last up to 4 or 5 years on particular applications,” says Steve. “They don’t require any lubrication or tensioning which means once installed, they are relatively hands-free on the maintenance side,” he adds. CBC Senior Account Manager of more than 43 years, Brian Crouch, recently identified an opportunity to put the belts into action at the Viva Energy Geelong Refinery near his branch in Geelong, Victoria. “I’ve looked after the Viva Energy site for 28 years, supplying all the power transmissions componentry there,” says Brian. “I’ve worked on many projects over the years for them. But more recently, I upgraded all their fin fan belt drives.”
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A new force: Introducing the NTN-CBC Housed Bearing Program

High load carrying capacity, robust design, and simplified installation are all features that describe the new plummer block and spherical roller bearing combination offered by the NTN-CBC division of Industrial Solutions Australia part of Motion Asia Pacific. Already a strong force in the domestic bearing market, the joint venture formed between the Japanese-founded bearing manufacturer and Australia’s largest bearing supplier has been providing NTN bearings and CBC-branded bearing housings to a wide array of industries for many years.  Earlier this year, the group launched the first NTN-CBC branded housing, in the SNG split plummer block range, culminating the group’s years of experience in housing design.  NTN-CBC Australia (integrated with the Motion Asia Pacific-Industrial Solutions group of CBC, BSC and WebsterBSC businesses) has gone to great lengths in setting specifications for the housings to ensure that they are both durable
and versatile.  Both NTN and CBC have extensive experience in providing bearing housing and sealing solutions. NTN is a global bearing manufacturer, and the CBC engineering team has decades of experience designing bearing housings. The new NTN-CBC branded SNG plummer block is the culmination of years of research by the team to come up with the optimum design in terms of durability, heat dissipation, protective sealing systems, and ease of re-lubrication.   Read More