Bearing Manufacturing: From Hand Fitting to ABB

Every electric motor, wheel hub and washing machine drum turns on rolling bearings, and bearing manufacturing is one of the most repetitive jobs in metalworking. Rings have to be turned, hardened, ground to a few microns, filled with balls or rollers, greased, sealed and checked, millions of times a year. This post looks at how bearings were made by hand and on early grinding lines, how SKF and others automated the flow of rings in the twentieth century, what a recent SKF camera inspection project shows about today's plants, and where ABB robots fit in grinding, assembly and inspection cells.

A 1950s SKF ball bearing made in Sweden, with its two rows of balls visible. Photo: R. Henrik Nilsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How bearings went from hand fitting to grinding lines

Philip Vaughan, an ironmaster in Carmarthen in Wales, drew up a ball bearing design in 1794. In 1869 the Paris bicycle mechanic Jules Suriray built a radial ball bearing, and it rode on the winning bicycle in the Paris to Rouen race that November. Bearings of that era came out of small workshops, with rings turned on lathes and balls finished in small batches. Getting a bearing to run smoothly meant measuring, sorting and fitting parts by hand, so the result depended heavily on the skill of the people at the bench.

A worker at the SKF roller bearing factory in Philadelphia, 1942 or 1943. Photo: Marjory Collins, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Industrial bearing making took off in the early twentieth century. In Gothenburg, Sven Wingquist applied for a Swedish patent on his self-aligning ball bearing on 16 February 1907, and SKF was founded the same year. By 1912 the company was represented in 32 countries, and by 1930 it had more than 21,000 staff in 12 factories, the largest in Philadelphia. Marjory Collins photographed that Philadelphia plant for the US Office of War Information in 1942 and 1943, when machinists, inspectors and foremen still handled every ring and roller.

A woman at work at the SKF roller bearing factory in Philadelphia, 1942 or 1943. Photo: Marjory Collins, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Most of the precision comes from grinding and measuring, and those steps were mechanised early. The local museum in Eltmann, Germany, where the Schweinfurt bearing maker FAG has run a branch plant since 1943, shows a machine for grinding balls to a true sphere and a machine built to measure and sort large numbers of balls by size. In the 1970s SKF began a European rationalisation programme, the "Production Concept for the 80s", which aimed to run night shifts practically unmanned. To feed it, SKF developed FlexLink plastic chain conveyors that moved bearing rings automatically between machines.

A ball grinding plate shown in the local museum in Eltmann, home of an FAG bearing plant. Photo: Nemracc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cameras, cobots and robot cells in bearing plants now

A modern line still follows the old steps: turning, heat treatment, grinding of faces, bores and raceways, honing, assembly, washing, greasing, sealing and testing. What has changed is how parts move and how they are checked. In September 2026, Forbes contributor Steve Banker wrote about SKF's plant in Flowery Branch, Georgia, where controls engineer Dave Thomas brought in AI camera inspection from the startup Overview. One system uses four cameras to perform 32 checks, which needs different lighting and rotation of the part.

The SKF plant in Steyr, Austria. Photo: Christoph Waghubinger (Lewenstein) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 AT)

The Georgia site runs three of these camera systems, another SKF plant uses the same tool, and nine more are planned, according to the article. Setup took about a day and a half. For now a part fails if either a human inspector or the cameras find a defect, and SKF plans to move to cameras only. The company aims for payback on such investments in under 24 months. With about 140 SKF plants worldwide, a tool proven in one cell has plenty of places to go.

An old machine for measuring and sorting bearing balls by size, in the Eltmann museum. Photo: Nemracc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

No source shows ABB robots in this SKF project, but bearing plants are full of jobs ABB arms already do in other metalworking cells. An IRB 1300 can load and unload rings at a grinder or honing machine, and an IRB 6700 can handle the large rings used in wind turbines. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can present parts to a camera station next to inspectors. IRB 460 or IRB 660 palletizers stack finished boxes, and Flexley Mover AMRs can carry ring bins between machines. Cells like these are usually laid out first in RobotStudio, as in our post on gear manufacturing robots.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

What comes next for bearing manufacturing

Over the next few years the main change will be closing the loop between inspection and the machines. If a camera sees a raceway drifting out of tolerance, the grinder can be corrected before scrap piles up, and the article notes that SKF wants to link its vision data with its manufacturing execution systems and use AI to predict maintenance, quality and changeover problems. Robots that load parts in a fixed orientation make that easier, because every ring reaches the camera the same way. The same data can also tell a maintenance team when a grinding wheel or a spindle is wearing, long before the parts start to fail inspection.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Home buyers never see a bearing plant, but they own the results in every washing machine drum, fan and bicycle hub. In factories, demand from electric vehicles, wind power and robots themselves keeps pushing for tighter tolerances and more variants in smaller batches. That favours flexible cells over long dedicated lines: a cobot or small industrial robot that can be retaught for a new ring size in an afternoon, using tools such as the Wizard easy programming interface, described in our guide to controlling robots with no code.

A modern rolling element bearing, 60 mm across on the outside. Photo: Massimiliano Lincetto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A robot cell around an existing grinder costs real money, and older machines may need new doors, sensors and interfaces before a robot can tend them. Safety rules apply as soon as people and robots share an inspection bench, which is where cobots and SafeMove zones help. Skills may be the hardest part. Plants need people who understand grinding, metrology and robot programming at the same time, and those people are hard to hire, and the Forbes piece shows how much depends on one engineer willing to test new tools.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

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