Turbochargers, shock absorbers and brake boosters: what a car asks of a spring
Disc springs for automotive applications have to do three difficult things at once: deliver high force in almost no space, survive millions of cycles, and hold that force while the surrounding metal heats and cools. SCHNORR disc springs are used in turbochargers, shock absorbers and brake force amplifiers, and are trusted across automotive, energy, heavy […]
Stamping machines, spindles and percussion drills: springs that live under impact
Impact duty punishes springs. Disc springs for machine tools cope because they are largely self damping, deliver high loads from a short stack, and have a long, predictable service life under dynamic load. SCHNORR components are used in stamping machines, spindles, percussion drilling machines and sliding hubs in conveyor drives, where the load arrives suddenly […]
Offshore drills and safety valves: high load joints in hostile places
Offshore drills and safety valves ask for everything at once: high force in a small envelope, corrosion resistance, temperature capability and documentation. Disc springs for oil and gas duty are specified from the environment inwards, using corrosion resistant stainless grades, X22 CrMoV 12-1 to 500 degrees C, or Inconel X718 and X750 to 600 degrees […]
Rail clamps, ski lifts and elevator brakes: joints that must not move for twenty years
Stationary railway clamps, ski lift cable clamps and emergency brakes in elevators are all joints where the clamping force has to survive years of thermal movement, weather and vibration without maintenance. Disc springs for rail applications and lift applications hold that force because a series stack absorbs movement while keeping the load roughly constant, and […]
Heat, salt water and magnets: choosing the right material for a spring or washer
A spring that is correctly sized and wrongly specified will still fail. Heat relaxes it, corrosion pits it, and the wrong alloy near a sensor puts a magnetic field where nobody wanted one. Here is how the material choice actually gets made, in the order the questions come up.
Disc spring stacks: how series and parallel stacking changes the force you get
A disc spring is a cone shaped washer that carries load along its axis. On its own it does something no coil spring can: it delivers a very high force in a very short installation length. Understanding how disc springs work in stacks is what turns that into a design tool, because the same part can be arranged to give you travel, load, or a curve that changes as it compresses.
Type S or type VS: how to pick the right safety washer, and fit it properly
Most of the questions we take in Ann Arbor are some version of the same one: which washer, and does it go in the right way round. Both are worth answering properly, because the wrong choice or a careless fit undoes the locking effect you paid for.
Why bolted joints come loose under vibration, and what actually holds them
Every maintenance engineer has seen the same failure. A joint that was torqued correctly at build comes back six months later with the nut finger tight, the paint cracked around the washer face, and the bolt head polished where it has been moving. Nothing is broken. The joint simply stopped clamping.