Making Your Gear Reducer Purchase Count

Those in the market for gear reducers may be fooled by their simplistic function – lowering the input shaft’s rotational speed and increasing the power provided to the output shaft, all at a particular ratio.

While the functions of a reducer may be relatively simple, this does not mean their selection process warrants a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

For our piece today, we’re going to delve into some of the aspects you should prepare in advance prior to making your decision:

Clarify Your Duty Cycle

Gear reducers are designed with long duty cycles in mind, for example, it is not uncommon to run at full load for 12 hours per day for 5 days a week. However, this standard can vary drastically between production lines – making it important to specify factors such as:

• Start/stop frequency
• Forward/reverse shifting
• Peak startup torque
• Recurrent torque load changes

These criteria all substantiate into determining the service factor for your reducer. A reducer’s service factor is defined as a multiplier that is applied to its rated horsepower, this provides the reducer the tolerance to meet this new horsepower rating under certain loading conditions.

As you can see, analysis of your duty cycle can go a long way in finalising the product you land on.

Evaluate Stresses

Wear is something that you’ll want to mitigate as much as is possible. As you may be aware, wear in the form of severe shocks or loads can expedite the road towards reducer failure as gear teeth and bearings get worn down.

This, however, isn’t the end of the story - the distribution of the load during operation should be taken into consideration i.e. uniform or non-uniform loads. Higher service factors will apply to non-uniform loading, no matter how minute they might be.

Environmental Conditions

Where your reducer will be operating can have large implications on your selection process due to the conditions it will be subjected to.

One such condition is temperature, this comes into play in either extreme, with high temperatures (for instance, from poor ventilation) invariably leading to reducer failure. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely low temperatures can accelerate the wear on the components of a reducer should a proper lubrication not be chosen.

Check with an Expert…

Of course, while these steps will help you go a long way in pinpointing some of the requirements from your gear reducers, nothing beats the expertise provided by your supplier’s Sales Engineering team.

We recognised the demand for this expertise at Bauer GMC back in 2017, when we successfully expanded our new sales and assembly centre, located in BC. Our team is ready and able to equip your production line with one of the gear reducers from our extensive catalogue!