Bushings
Sleeve bushings in brass, bronze and steel: brass bushing fittings, self-lubricating sleeve types and steel bushings for shafts that slide or turn slowly.
Bushings · brass fittings · steel sleeves · self-lubricating types
The plain-bearing set
A bushing is the plain bearing in its simplest form: a sleeve that a shaft turns or slides inside, with no rolling elements at all. Two branches stand here. Brass bushing fittings run in brass and bronze with PTFE, sleeve type, self-lubricating — the choice where the joint oscillates, runs slowly, or cannot be oiled. Steel bushings run in 20CrMo, chrome and stainless steels, where the sleeve is a wear part inside a harder assembly or a spacer with a bearing's accuracy.
| Bushing branch | Materials |
|---|---|
| Brass bushing fittings | Brass, bronze and PTFE, self-lubricating sleeve type |
| Steel bushings | 20CrMo, chrome steel and stainless steel |
Bushing or ball bearing
The bushing and the ball bearing answer different movements. A bushing suits slow, oscillating or heavily loaded small movements, tight envelopes and dirty positions where a sleeve can be sacrificed and replaced. A ball bearing suits continuous rotation, speed and low friction. Many assemblies carry both — bearings on the rotating shafts, bushings on the pivots — and the same inquiry can list both, the steel ball bearing lines by code and the bushing lines by dimension set. What a bushing order should not do is convert a bearing code into a sleeve size by assumption; the sleeve is specified by its own three dimensions.
Specifying a sleeve bushing
A bushing is three dimensions and a material: inside diameter, outside diameter and length, in brass, bronze, PTFE-lined or the named steel. The duty adds the rest — oscillating or rotating, oiled or dry, the shaft material it runs against where that is fixed. Fittings add their thread or connection form, which belongs in the same line. Because bushings are small and ordered in quantity, the count per dimension set matters as much as the set; a bushing list is usually the longest list on a transmission inquiry and the one where a missing length is most often discovered late.
Bushings across the range
Bushings sit inside the transmission parts set alongside the pulleys and belts they share machines with, and they reappear inside the linear family in spirit — a linear ball bushing is a rolling relative of the plain sleeve. Buyers replacing worn sleeves in existing equipment should copy the old sleeve's dimensions rather than its position name; position names repeat across machines, dimension sets do not. Where the sleeve is a fitting with a thread, photograph or drawing references travel with the inquiry as for any custom part.
Bushings are consumables in most of the machines they serve, so orders repeat: keep the three dimensions and the material together as one record per size, and a repeat order is a quantities-only message. Where a bushing has worn early, say so in that message — the material answer for a short-lived bore is often bronze where the original was steel, or the reverse.
Related pages
Send an inquiry
Give the three dimensions and material for each bushing on your list, with quantities and the destination market, and send it through the inquiry form.