World War Two Ball Bearing Production

[Mike Cecil]

With reference to Mike Kelly's post (2, above), there had been a ball bearing re-manufacturing/refurbishment company with the very imaginative(!) name of the Australian Ball-Bearing Company operating in Melbourne since 1922. Nevertheless, new ball bearings and components for refurbishing bearings were all imported.

From early in WW2, this meant the USA almost exclusively, with many, many thousands of bearings purchased under the 'cash-and-carry' scheme of November 1939 to March 1941,followed by the Lend Lease scheme from March 1941. Australia's home-grown AFV, aircraft, ship, railway and agricultural machinery production and anything else that used ball and tapered roller and roller bearings were all wholly dependent upon imported bearings (among other components not produced locally). The Echuca factory came into limited production in 1944 using mostly machine tools imported from the USA, but was never developed to a size that could cater to all of Australia's wartime needs.

Mike

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Some things never change: bearing sizes for example.

Here’s a new SKF bearing for an 80 year old Sherman tank idler wheel.

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