Originally Posted by
Panop
I know they're small things individually but I would have imagined the British war effort would have needed some fairly serious amounts of them. Where/how did the Americans get theirs?
There are some substantial bearing manufacturers in the USA, of course, of which the Timken Corp from Ohio was probably the market leader at the time. Likewise in Britain, and presumably Germany. The point about SKF in Sweden is that they were one of the largest manufacturers but with a very limited home market, so unlike the others they worked mostly for export. Thus they had a substantial capacity which the sudden wartime demands formed a ready market for.