Philadelphia Gear Gearbox Repair and Rebuild

Philadelphia Gear has been building industrial gearing since the 1890s and is known for large, engineered drives rather than catalog reducers. That means the units we see are often custom, decades old, and critical to the plant. 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 seals that let the oil out and the contamination in. 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 the drive runs a cooling tower fan on the Gulf Coast or a vertical turbine pump in the desert, send it in and we will tell you exactly what is wrong. If the gears themselves are the problem, our gear cutting shop cuts replacements in house.

Philadelphia Gear equipment is well built, 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 and collapse. Rolling element bearings simply run out of life, and on vertical pump drives the thrust bearing carries the whole pump column. Once the race spalls you get heat, metal in the oil, and eventually a seized shaft.
• Tooth flank pitting and spalling. Overload, misalignment and degraded oil cause pitting on helical and spiral bevel flanks. Left alone it grows into spalling and broken teeth. We inspect every flank for wear pattern and contact before deciding what gets reground and what gets recut.
• Shaft, bore and keyway wear. Input and output shafts, coupling bores and keyways wear and fret over years of service, which throws off alignment and feeds damage back into the bearings and gears.
• Seal failure and contamination. Cooling tower and pump drives live in wet, dirty conditions. Worn seals let water and grit in and oil out, and by the time the leak is obvious the internal damage is often already done.
• Housing distortion and cracked feet. Old cast 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 new.

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 Philadelphia Gear dealer or service center and we are not affiliated with the Philadelphia Gear brand or its owners. We name Philadelphia Gear 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.