The Problem
The plant's cooling tower fan drive — a 22 kW spiral bevel right-angle gearbox sourced a decade ago from a European OEM — failed catastrophically. Root cause was eventually traced to pitting on the ring gear from inadequate oil film thickness during a brief under-filling event three years earlier.
The OEM quoted a 14-week factory lead time for a replacement, plus shipping and customs. Every day the cooling tower fan was offline, the plant had to de-rate one reactor by 35%, costing roughly Rs 11 lakh per day in deferred production.
The plant's own maintenance team could not retrofit a standard Indian-market gearbox because the original unit had specific foundation bolt spacing, shaft heights, and mounting orientation that ruled out drop-in alternatives.
The Solution
We collected the failed unit, measured every interface dimension in a day, and designed a dimensionally-identical Anand Gears spiral bevel gearbox. Same foundation bolt pattern, same input and output shaft heights, same mounting orientation — so the replacement dropped straight onto the existing base without field modification.
Gears were cut on our Gleason-convertible machine with a 10:1 Gleason spiral bevel set. Housing was cast at our partner foundry, machined on our Bridgeport CNC lathes, with stainless steel hardware and a Niploy-equivalent marine-spec coating for the outdoor corrosive environment.
We also corrected the flaw that caused the original failure: the new unit has a sight-glass oil level indicator visible from the access platform, plus a temperature sensor wired to the plant's PLC, so any repeat under-filling would raise an alarm before damage occurred.
Delivery: 5 weeks from order to on-site installation — including foundry casting, machining, heat-treat, assembly, shop running-in, and transport.
The Result
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Replacement lead time | 14 weeks (import) | 5 weeks |
| Cost | Import baseline | ~40% of import price |
| Deferred production saved | ~Rs 7 crore vs 14-week wait | |
| Running hours since install | ~13,000 hours (18 months) | 0 service calls |
“I needed it working. They understood that, and they delivered. Five weeks instead of fourteen, at less than half the imported price, and the unit's been silent since installation.”
— Maintenance Head, Chemical Plant (Gujarat)
Photos from the Job
Facing a similar application challenge?
Share your drive specs — power, speed, duty cycle, shaft geometry, environment — and we'll tell you what we'd build and whether we can match your lead time.
Talk to an Engineeror call +91 98203 83719 • anandgears@gmail.com