Timken bearings play a key role in mammoth move

The Timken Company recently played a major role in moving one of the largest loads ever carried by a wheeled vehicle.

Media kit: www.timken.com/media/kits/Scheuerle.asp

A fully assembled and equipped oil and gas production facility – weighing 1.5 times the Eiffel Tower or 55 times the Statue of Liberty – was transported by the specialist transport company Abnormal Load Engineering (ALE) of Great Britain. The facility tipped the scales at 12,430 tons, or 11,300 metric tons.

The transport required the use of hundreds of modular transporters, 224 of which were supplied by Scheuerle. The wheel sets of those transporters were equipped with Timken tapered roller bearings to ensure that the heavy load reached its destination smoothly and reliably.

"This extremely demanding application has once again demonstrated the value delivered by Timken," said Mike Connors, Timken's vice president for industrial equipment. "With our knowledge of friction management and experience of heavy-load applications, we were able to support Scheuerle in accomplishing this major technical feat and at the same time to cement our relationship with a key customer."

The Timken bearings were manufactured from case-hardened roller bearing steel and matched to this specific transport operation.

The facility was moved about five-eighths of a mile (about one kilometer) from its production site to a load-out wharf located in Hartlepool, England, for transfer to a barge.