Western Gear Gearbox Repair and Rebuild

Western Gear was one of the big American gear builders of the twentieth century, supplying industrial reducers, custom drives and heavy gearing to mines, oilfields, shipyards and mills. The company changed hands and the industrial gear lines were broken up long ago, so today the brand mostly means one thing to a plant: a rugged old gearbox on a critical machine, and nobody to buy parts from. Most of what we see on these units is the same handful of failure patterns: bearings that ran out their life, tooth flank pitting, worn shafts and bores, and seals that let the oil out. We have built our process around catching 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 Western Gear drive runs a mine hoist, a pump jack or a draw block, send it in and we will tell you exactly what is wrong. Because these rebuilds usually mean cutting gears from scratch, our gear cutting shop is where most of the work happens.

Western Gear equipment was built heavy, so failures almost always trace back to load, lubrication or simple age, not to bad design. These are the conditions we find most often.

• Bearing fatigue. After decades of hours the races spall, the rollers skid, and heat and metal in the oil follow. Often the bearing size is obsolete too, and we select a modern equivalent that fits the housing.
• Tooth flank pitting and spalling. Overload, misalignment and degraded oil pit the helical and bevel flanks. Left alone it grows into spalling and broken teeth. We inspect every flank and decide what gets reground and what gets cut new.
• 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 lube starvation. Old seal designs harden and leak, the oil level drops, and the gears and bearings run starved. 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, because for a Western Gear unit the housing cannot be replaced.

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