Plants for the manufacture of optical storage media are designed for extremely high speeds. A CD for example is produced in less than a second. The demands on the individual machine elements are correspondingly high. The polymer rod end bearings play an essential role to ensure this high number of cycles. At their headquarters in Baden Wuerttemberg, STEAG HamaTech designs, develops, produces and markets plants and equipment for the production of optical storage media and supplies the optical disk industry with system solutions for all current disk formats. The cycle time of a plant for the manufacturing of one CD Rom has been about 4 seconds for years. Today this cycle time is 1.6 seconds. This has increased productivity by 250%. As a rule, the plants are in operation round the clock, 365 days a year. The handling units thereby come to 17.5 to 20 million individual cycles per year. Inevitably, high demands are posed on the suppliers of components.

igubal® polymer rod end bearings exhibit their strengths in this demanding environment. igubal® is a system of self-aligning bearing elements completely made of plastic. The handling of the lacquer mode was simulated on a test bench. The test has been on-going for two and a half years and has now reached about 94 million cycles - yet the rod end bearings still look almost new.