The right stuff
As a yachtsman, I consider the blue part of the world map to be the most interesting part. So does our customer Unitor, which serves merchant ships in 969 ports worldwide. Last year Unitor served more than 17,000 ships with hardware and software ranging from different forms of gas to bearings.
This edition of Evolution has “extremes” as a theme.
We are featuring extreme, or demanding, bearing applications – and also extremes of location.
When you read Evolution you probably don’t think about the high-performance equipment required to print it. Our case story about MAN Roland tells you more about this and the fact that quality standards for printing machines are on the same level as standards in the aerospace industry. And, no surprise, it was in that industry that we found another example of extreme technology: an aircraft that is part helicopter, part airplane. Imagine taking off vertically, helicopter-style, from the roof of a city office building, and seeing the motors change position in mid-air to allow you to fly horizontally, as you would in an airplane.
Do you know that drilling just one hole for oil exploration can cost 15 to 20 million U.S. dollars? Which is why it’s so important that all parts of the drilling equipment, including the bearings and other SKF products, are of high quality. And downhole drilling is even tougher to accomplish. Read about BakerHughes Inteq and the company’s drill motor, where the bearings are lubricated by mud.
For geographic extremes, we are looking at SKF’s most northern and southern authorized distributors. They both serve the fishing industry, and the companies are run as family operations.
As a yachtsman, I consider the blue part of the world map to be the most interesting part. So does our customer Unitor, which serves merchant ships in 969 ports worldwide. Last year Unitor served more than 17,000 ships with hardware and software ranging from different forms of gas to bearings.
We also have a very interesting profile in this issue of Evolution – Jack Welch, CEO and chairman of General Electric. If you haven’t read any of his books, you have some interesting reading ahead of you.
In the last issue of Evolution on the Web we introduced a new service that allows you to simply fill in a form if you want to sign up yourself or a friend for a free copy of the print Evolution.
We launched the service at noon on Oct. 1, 1998. The first order came in a half hour later, from Yaakob Baharom, an engineer at the Honda factory in Malaysia.
Hope you have pleasant reading.
Janerik Dimming
Editor-in-chief