Whether it is bearings, seals, chains, lubricants... SKF and its Peer brand Agri Solutions range helps slash maintenance times for the farmer on the go
Every Australian farmer is looking for a way to do more with less – whether it be with fewer staff or reducing their use of fertiliser and agricultural chemicals.
This is also true of grease and other lubricants for farm machinery. The days when farmers just poured lubricants into the grease points to the point of overflowing are now well and truly over.
Mark Williamson of Applied Industrial Technologies says he has seen a significant spike in demand for maintenance-free and optimised sealing solutions from Australian agricultural manufacturers.
With much of Australia’s agricultural machinery manufacturing centred around the tillage and seeding industries, Williamson says most operators are looking to reduce the time spent on greasing, as well as the grease itself.
“The benefits of that are the maintenance and safety issues – you haven’t got people crawling all over machines lubricating them – and there is that environmental push, and rightly so,” he says.
“But the biggest thing is waste – most people over grease their bearing units or systems and they just waste money – it’s quite bizarre.”
Williamson adds that the rise of autonomous vehicles is also causing a spike in demand for maintenance-free equipment – as operators may not necessarily be out in the paddock with the equipment in future.
“I can see it’s becoming more prevalent across this sector, and I think it will happen a lot more rapidly than we think.”
Williamson says that manufacturers have been turning away from the trailer hubs they traditionally used, to a more unitised system.
These assets all come together with SKF’s Agri Hub range – preassembled units that make installation simpler and reduce logistical efforts, while also providing a sealed, maintenance free hub solution.
“Labour’s a cost. So, if the solution we supply is an assembly, and farmers/manufacturers just literally have to install it, maybe, do one nut to tighten up the shaft into the arm that the unit’s being installed on, it is a lot more cost effective,” he says.
“There’s less likelihood of premature failures than if they have to employ people to assemble bearings into a hub and put that hub onto the shaft and tighten the nut up and get the right end play in the bearing arrangement.”
SKF agricultural engineer Bernd Albert says that the most prominent items in the market are those that improve sealing, which helps increase the lifetime of a bearing.
“It’s not only the number of seal lips, but also the design of the seal, and how the seal is pressed into the outer ring that makes the difference.”
“Even sometimes within the same bearing, there can be multiple options for specific applications – e.g., you could have the same bearing with different seal designs.”
Based in Melbourne but with many branches across regional Australia and New Zealand, Applied Industrial Technologies is an agricultural distributor for SKF and its Peer brand.
For Williamson, this diverse range makes SKF the right partner for the Australian market, and the diverse needs of its farmers.
“For us to look closely at that for each individual application is really important” he says.