Testing Lubricants and Bearing Materials: A Description of a Useful Rolls‐Royce Testing Machine Available to Purchase

THE mechanical testing of engineering materials, such as tensile testing, hardness measurements, etc., has already attained a reasonable degree of standardization. The results of such tests can be expressed numerically and they furnish to a great extent adequate data to the designer who wishes to use them. Lubrication and bearing practice, however, has hardly emerged from the cradle of empiricism. Theory has had, as yet, but slight influence in developing reasonable design data and there still remains a wide field of research before the results can be expressed in such a simple tangible way as to transform efficient bearing design into mere slide rule manipulation. Precedent, past experience and a few odd rules are normally the designer's only guide and expensive practical experience his only check.