Bardens's bearing designs for surgical cutting tools are manufactured in corrosion-resistant 440C stainless steel, which provides resistance to cleaning chemicals and other aggressive acidic media.
The bearings, which the company supplies as deep-groove or angular contact configurations, are normally provided with phenolic cages to provide further resistance to repeated sterilisation cycles.
Barden provides integral shields that are designed to help retain the lubricant - normally a food-grade grease in surgical tool applications - while preventing the ingress of contaminants.
'This improved sealing design reduces the critical gap between the integral shield and the bearing inner ring to 60 per cent of that when compared to conventional shield and circlip designs' said Barney Eley, product engineer at Barden.
'This means you get a reduction in operating noise, greater lubricant retention and improved protection from contaminants - all of which often leads to a longer life of the cutting tool,' he added.
Barden's manufacturing plant in Plymouth has more than 1700m2 of fully equipped cleanroom facilities, where all assembly, testing and packing operations take place.
'On a recent surgical sawing tool project, the bearings we provided were custom-engineered angular contact ball bearings with an outside diameter of 4.76mm and contained balls just 0.79mm in diameter, which is the smallest diameter we have provided for this sort of application,' said Eley.
The bearings provided were of a double-row cartridge design with a single inner ring and two outer rings.
'This design enabled us to incorporate an integral, one-piece shield on both sides of the bearing in order to prevent ingress of contaminants and to retain the lubricant,' he added.
'This one-piece pre-loaded custom-designed bearing solution made assembly much easier for the customer, who simply had to drop the bearing into position within the overall tool-drive assembly,' he added.
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