Less is more. Or, at least, more in not more. When your coupling selection is too big for its motion system britches, at best, your losing efficiency. Stepping up a size to a coupling that it slightly larger than necessary isn’t always going to cause a catastrophic failure, which is why we often let it slide. To help us understand the situation, Randy Kingsbury, mechanical engineer and vice president of sales and marketing at Helical Products Company, weighs in.
“We work all the time with applications engineers, and what we’ve found is that they’re using our catalog and trying to figure out the best way to fit our catalog coupling into their application. When they call, we review the application. We find that we can actually choose a better solution for them by designing a custom coupling. They’re often surprised that a custom coupling doesn’t necessarily mean more expensive.
When people are trying to stick with a catalog part, they might find that the coupling has a 1-1/4-in. outside diameter but doesn’t have enough torque capacity. Logically, they have to jump up a size. What happens is the engineer ends up with a coupling that’s more expensive and too large. It can also be heavier with more inertia than they actually require because the next size down is too small. Instead, engineers can have a custom coupling with the exact size and torque capacity required. We can do this now because machining technology has truly pushed things forward. You can now machine more difficult features and hold tighter tolerances. The ability to machine specialty materials has greatly improved with the current machining technology.”
Helical
heli-cal.com