Horsburgh & Scott Gearbox Repair and Rebuild

Horsburgh & Scott has been cutting gears in Cleveland since the 1880s and is known for large, engineered gearing rather than catalog reducers. That means the units we see are heavy, often custom, frequently decades old, and always critical. Most of what fails comes down to the same handful of causes: bearings that have run out their life, tooth flank pitting from overload or degraded oil, worn shafts and bores, and housings that have cracked or gone out of round. We have built our process around finding all of it before we quote a single part.

Distance is not a problem. We offer free shipping both ways, free pickup and delivery including crating and rigging, and a free inspection before you commit to anything. Whether your drive turns a ball mill, a kiln, a rolling mill or a dryer, send it in and we will tell you exactly what is wrong. For the mill side of this work, see our ball mill gearbox repair and pinion gear repair pages.

Horsburgh & Scott equipment is built heavy, so failures almost always trace back to load, lubrication or time, not to bad design. These are the conditions we find most often.

• Bearing fatigue under mill load. Mill and kiln drives carry enormous, uneven loads for years. When the races spall you get heat, metal in the oil, and eventually a seized shaft that can take the gearing with it.
• Tooth flank pitting and spalling. Overload, misalignment and degraded oil pit the helical and bevel flanks. On large gearing the damage is expensive to ignore because a broken tooth on a bull gear is a broken line. We inspect every flank for wear pattern and contact.
• Pinion and girth gear mismatch. A worn pinion running against a girth gear wears both. We cut and match new pinions and check the mesh so the pair runs on the correct contact pattern.
• Shaft, bore and keyway wear. Input and output shafts, coupling bores and keyways wear and fret, which throws off alignment and feeds damage back into the bearings and gears.
• Housing distortion and cracked feet. Large cast and fabricated housings crack at the feet and bearing bores go out of round. We line bore and weld repair rather than scrap a housing that cannot be bought.

Because so many of these failures start at the bearings, we treat bearing work as its own discipline. See our bearing repair page.

We are an independent gear repair shop. We are not an authorized Horsburgh & Scott dealer or service center and we are not affiliated with the Horsburgh & Scott brand or its owners. We name Horsburgh & Scott only to describe the equipment we service, and we repair and rebuild these units as an OEM alternative for plants that need them back in service without OEM lead times.

Because we ship free both ways and handle pickup, delivery, crating and rigging at no charge, it does not matter whether your plant is in Texas or across the country. The inspection is free and there is no obligation to proceed. If you want to see the kind of heavy industrial work we do every day, our industries and brands pages cover the rest of the equipment we keep running.

Up to a 24 month workmanship warranty backs every rebuild, which is our way of standing behind the fact that the unit really did leave here right.