AST Bearings located in Montville, N.J. offers these high-quality Spherical Plain Bearings, which are manufactured in a wide variety of materials designed to offer bearing solutions in almost any operating environment. AST Bearings offers a complete line of Spherical Plain Bearings available in inch and metric. Engineering and application assistance is available through AST's added-value services.

These High-Quality Spherical Plain Bearings are suitable for heavy-duty, off-highway vehicles, agricultural equipment, construction and mining and logging equipment, packaging and textile equipment, and robotics. The Plain bearings come in standard industrial bore sizes from 0.5" to 12" inches, as well as metric sizes from 4 to 300mm.

Spherical Plain Bearings also known as Plain Bearings or Ball Bushings have an inner ring with a sphere convex outside surface and an outer ring with a correspondingly sphere, but concave inside surface. Their design makes them particularly suitable for bearing arrangements where alignment movements between shaft and housing have to accommodate, or where oscillating or recurrent tilting movements must be permitted at relatively slow sliding speeds.

Spherical Plain Bearings requiring maintenance (steel-on-steel) have hardened sliding contact surface on both rings. The surfaces are treated with molybdenum disulphide and phosphate. It has characteristics of wear- resistance and wear-corrosion. Plain Bearings with this sliding contact surface combination require regular relubrication. The high strength of the sliding contact surfaces makes these bearings especially suitable for bearing arrangements where heavy loads of alternating direction, shock loads or heavy static loads have to be accommodated.

Spherical Plain Bearings are also available in Maintenance-Free types. Maintenance-free sliding contact surfaces have types:

• Steel-on-PTFE composite material
• Steel-on-PTFE fabric
• Steel-on-Copper alloy.

Dynamic load support capability of Steel-on-PTFE fabric Spherical Plain Bearings is higher than that of Steel-on-PTFE composite material. They have very low friction and can be operated without maintenance. They are used for applications where long bearing life is required without maintenance, or where operating conditions, such as, inadequate lubrication or the absence of lubrication make the use of Steel-on-Steel bearing inadvisable.