Custom On-Site Solutions

When a customer contacted us about major wear they had on a 10ft diameter bearing surface, we knew it was something that would be right up our alley. It was immediately apparent that a lot of material had to be removed, and the kicker was that it couldn’t be done with a rigid machine. Options were weighed, and Atlas got to work designing and building a custom polishing machine unlike anything we had used before. A few weeks later, the customer was running their ball mill with a resurfaced tire bearing, hopeful it would last another 30 years.

Custom designed and developed with turbine housing stud removal in mind, Atlas' portable programmable hydraulic drill has served more purposes in our field operations than expected. This drill is capable of thread interpolation, among its many other functions.

As a part of a century-old hydroelectric plant rebuild/update project, Atlas was charged with milling vertical mounting slots inside of a generator housing. While this may not sound incredibly challenging, the space and mounting constraints coupled with the dimensional accuracy requirements made it quite unique. Within a couple of weeks Atlas designed and built two custom “mini mills” to tackle the job. They were successfully used in combination with laser tracker metrology to mill 48 vertical mounting slots, equally spaced around the inner circumference of each of 7 generator housings.

When an industrial fan OEM contacted Atlas with a proposal to assist in retrofitting a massive fan with new bearings, we couldn’t turn them down. However, the project did require turning the bearing journals down to accommodate the new bearing design. In order to save the customer on downtime and teardown cost, we were to turn the fan shaft in place. Atlas engineering designed temporary shaft support bearings, a coupler and a mount for a hydraulic drive motor, and a mill cross-slide modification to utilize a single-point tool. Atlas successfully removed the old bearings, turned the bearing journals to spec, and installed the new bearings and housings without the need to remove the fan or shaft from its housing.