Swedish Exports of Ball Bearings | Hacker News Reader

Swedish Exports of Ball Bearings

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54 pointszeristor10 comments

Having made an 4 year excursion from IT into the world of making gears, I can attest that what seems like something fairly simple from the outside really isn't.

Just like a bearing, gears (ideally) have a rolling contact. The smoother and harder the faces the better, until you get to the point where fractures and spalling occur. The best gears are cut, sent out to be hardened via heat treat, then ground (with "superfinishing") to exact size. As with bearings, you have to get the size just right for long life.

Making featureless metal balls seems very easy, they have only one dimension and are perfectly symmetric.

.. until you realize that:

- they have extremely tight tolerances - they function together, a single defect one ruins the whole assembly - you have to make millions of them for cheap

Some things are deceptively hard. For a related fun fact, check out China's ballpoint pen adventures.

>China's ballpoint pen adventures

True. Though they've moved up in the world since then. They now have their own semiconductor fabs. Chinese industry of today is way more advanced than the China of the 90's making low margin nick-nacks.

go ahead then, explain their high-speed rail issues…

Reminds me of SKF's sponsorship of the new Marble Machine by Martin from Wintergatan

See for example this video, how to choose your ball bearing

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NO-BgMiC2yg

Setting away Mosquitos (the real Wunderwaffe of that war) for freight runs (and for stuffing the occasional Nobel Price physicist in the bomb bay) tells a rather different story about the importance of swedish-made ball bearings for UK arms production:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37884749

Great article about the Mosquito! Thanks. That's yet another HN rabbit hole! It confirmed a friend's war story I heard, first hand - about escaping from a German POW camp near Berlin - then proceeding to Copenhagen, with the help of the Danish underground, stealing a rowboat from a German yacht, rowing to Sweden at night. The wounded one stayed in Malmo, the other two continue to Stockholm. There they went to they Polish embassy. One stayed there, the other was sent to Scotland that night in a mosquito. (Later he went to London, then dropped by parachute behind enemy lines.) Now it's the first time I read a story to verify that other first hand account! (I obviously summarized an amazing tale.)

Similar dynamic to YKK's dominance of the zipper industry.

Now challenged by a few look-alike Chinese companies.

Thanks for sharing, reddit is wild how many great and randomly extremely thoughtful responses there are there!

It's often easy to forget among all the noise but reddit has a lot of the best of internet too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com