April 15, 1977 - Maritime Reporter and Engineering News

Water Lubricated Rubber Bearings Subject Of SNAME San Diego Meeting

At the March meeting of the San Diego Section of The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 56 members and guests heard the presentation of a technical paper on water lubricated rubber bearings.

The authors of the paper were introduced: Ray L. Orndorff Jr., senior product engineer, B.F.

Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio, and Nicholas Tiedeman, vice president, Lucian Q. Moffitt, Inc., Akron, Ohio.

Mr. Orndorff presented the paper, which discussed the history of this type of bearing from its invention by Charles Frederic, about 60 years ago, to its present state-of-the-art. He continued by presenting Goodrich's experimental results over the last 10 years, the test machines, and procedures used.

Mr. Orndorff concluded that water-lubricated rubber bearings have been around a long time, apparently fulfilling a need for a relatively crude device that will work for long periods of time in adverse conditions with minimum attention and maintenance; discoveries and developments such as reducing the rubber thickness, choosing a softer compound, and using nonmetallic backing materials have upgraded the performance of rubber bearings without sacrificing any of the desirable engineering properties; and that these improvements open the possibility of using rubber bearings for more sophisticated applications, such as for the ship inboard propeller shaft bearings which currently use oil-lubricated metal bearings; finally, that water as a lubricant offers a number of advantages— it stores twice as much heat as oil, it is very low in cost, there is an inexhaustible supply in most locations, and there are no pollution or reclaim problems.

Pete Nolan, nominating committee chairman, presented the slate of officers for the coming year and opened the meeting for nominations from the floor. The nomination slate for the officers are: chairman, C. William Bascom; vice chairman, Ralph J.

Bradford Jr.; secretary-treasurer, James C. Schaff; elected member of Executive Committee (to 1980), Robert J. Anders.

Tom Cole, Executive Committee member, Northern California Section, presented a short talk on what will be happening at the National Spring Meeting and STAR Symposium to be held May 25-27 of this year in San Francisco, Calif.

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