An Interview with David C. Orlowski, founder of Inpro/Seal and inventor of the bearing isolator.

CEO and founder of Inpro/Seal Company, David C. Orlowski has spent the last 41 years and counting working on ways to enhance and extend the service life of rotating equipment. The inventor of the bearing isolator, he is well known for his knowledge of bearings, bearing protection and tribology.

Recently, a journalist conducted a one-on-one interview with Dave where he covered many aspects of the bearing isolator and the organization he built around his invention.

For the next couple of months we will bring you excerpts from this interview. This month, Dave talks about how the bearing isolator was invented, the evolution of this invention, the early years, the importance of the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago and even how he named his company.

PART 2

How did you overcome initial objections?
We knew that we couldn’t compete on price against rubber lip seals in the pumps. The consumers had to be educated to the extent that they knew what the product was and what it would do for them. We were competing against a $2 lip seal. The customer in chemical processing plant would tell us over and over that for $40 he could buy 20 lip seals, now what do you have? One manufacture of lip seals had published articles stating that their lip seal could go out to as much as 3000 hours of operation before it would become ineffective. Of course there are 8760 hours in a year, and 3000 hours took you to the first of May. That was an extremely steep and difficult learning curve for the customers to accept the technology that we were offering.

As a manufacturer, are you addressing a maintenance person at a process plant?
Not always, sometimes the Chief Engineer. I remember one incident, in the Louviers building at Dupont. The person that I was interviewing told me that he never had any trouble with lip seals and some of them last up to thirty years and that he didn’t need a $40 replacement for a $2 lip seal. I almost killed the project, because if Dupont is not having problems with lip seals possibly no one was. It took a little bit of studying when I got back to Rock Island. I found out that the local plant of Dupont, in Clinton IA, was buying some $250,000 worth of bearings every year for rotating process equipment. The bearings were inexpensive at that point. $12 would get you a bearing that you could place in an ANSI pump but it is about a 10 to 1 ratio of the cost of the bearing and the cost of downtime, labor and disruption of process. Dupont in Clinton, IA was spending over 2 ½ million dollars a year for bearing failures. I don’t care if you are Dupont or anyone else in the chemical processing industry; a 2½ million-dollar expenditure is significant.

Was your product patented at the time?
During this time of development and research, we went for a patent and our first patent was granted in May of 1977. The patent number is 4,022,479. It was the first patent on anything, which would approach what we now call the Bearing Isolator. We had a patented device with a solution but nobody had a problem and it was very frustrating in the early days. However we could go out to industrial process plants, such as the corn industry and sell two at a time because the guy would really like to try these out. So he would try them out and they worked and didn’t wear. There lies the problem. We had a device that was so good and such long a life that once you retrofitted or an OEM manufacture would supply this device, being non-wearing and non-friction that was the end of the line for us in that we could not ever depend on replacing in kind. In theory, after we get all the bearing retrofitted or fitted with Bearing Isolators, we would theoretically be out of business. However at this point, to this date it looks like it might take 12,000 years to retrofit every bearing, and that will be well past my retirement age.

Does the end user today vs. the end user of 20 years ago; does he still have choices on sealing his pump? Is the lip seal still out there?
Yes the lip seal, and the misconceptions that they carry, are still out there. There are many manufactures of lip seals in this country and others that we feel that even to this day we don’t have more than 2% of the total available potential market.

What do you mean by lip seal misconceptions?
Let’s take oil mist as an example. When oil mist was first put into use, venting into the environment was not an issue and stray mist was not a problem. Since then, there have been dramatic changes in environmental, equipment and repair needs as this stray mist now needs to be contained. This is where the misconception starts.

For whatever reason people think that contact seals are their only option to contain oil mist. The problem is that contact seals wear out and have an unknown and unpredictable service life. With a 100% failure rate, end users have to contend with catastrophic failure and shutdown, let alone oil mist leakage.

In a typical oil mist application, atomized lubricant is injected into the bearing housing. Without a proper sealing method, it will escape through the shaft ends and exit into the environment, causing housekeeping, safety and other issues. With our oil mist Bearing Isolator, the lubricant is coalesced to a liquid and drains back into a system sump or reservoir instead of into the environment. Bearings are protected, shafts are sealed and environmental housekeeping problems are solved.

Bearing Isolators, on the other hand are non-contacting and do not wear out. Their simple construction consists of a rotor and stator, unitized so that they don’t separate from one another while in use. These components interact to keep contamination out of the bearing enclosure and the oil mist under control. Plus, because they operate without contact, they save energy and are made of non-sparking, non-volatile bronze material.

Can You Address The Use Of Lip Seals In More Detail?
Haven’t They Been Around For A Long Time? That is precisely the problem. When they were introduced into the market over 70 years ago, rubber lip seals were the only kind of sealing device available. Convenient, inexpensive and the “only show in town”, they went on to capture a 99% market share.

Today, lip seal manufacturers state that at best, they have a median, average life cycle of 1,844 hours or 77 days of operation, though some may survive up to 3,000 hours. In the world of non-industrial equipment such as (auto wheel bearings, mowers, washing machines, tractors), this is acceptable, as it works out to equipment life of more than 3 years of use.

Isn’t Three Years Acceptable?
Rotating equipment is designed by their respective OEMs to operate for at least five years. Rolling element bearings have a design life of 150,000 hours (17 years) or more. With a finite life and a 100% failure rate, it simply does not make sense to lose time and money trying to make a contacting seal work. In the real world, where plants operate 24/7, while trying to maintain a competitive edge, lip seals are not meant for use with heavy duty, industrial applications. Our brochure, “Are Lip Seals Obsolete?” provides much more on this subject.

How do you deal with these misconceptions?
Over the last couple of years, we had extensive research conducted into the use of bearing protection on a market-by-market, application-by-application basis. The results of this research showed us that people wanted to know more about Bearing Isolators. In fact, in some markets, as high as 70% of the respondents wanted more information.

From this, we adopted an “educate and inform” marketing approach in an effort to teach plant people about the features, advantages and benefits of bearing protection. We went on to develop two brochures: Are Lip Seals Obsolete? And An Introduction To Bearing Isolators…… A Short Lesson In Bearing Isolation.

We knew that once end users found out that Bearing Isolators never wear out and provide levels of protection unavailable in any kind of bearing protection device with bottom line implications, they would become a convert. Not only did they get fed up with 70-year-old technology, they went on to prefer the Inpro/Seal brand by an 80% margin.

Have these brochures been successful?
Both have gone on to become the most successful literature we have ever developed. Moreover, we have a sophisticated tracking system that enables us to tabulate the information we distribute through the Internet as well as our website, www.inpro-seal.com and our sister website, www.bearingisolators.com. The results indicate over seven million hits within a three-year tracking period. This is truly indicative of the increasing interest in our products.

What else does the end user have available to them, anything else?
There may be other manufacturers of bearing isolators, but they are not the same. With Inpro/Seal, an end user works directly with the inventor, a fact that makes this an authentic product. 98% of the bearing isolators we manufacture are of bronze materials of construction. The other 2% are based on customer application needs and may be constructed of other metals such as stainless steel, titanium, other exotics or a Teflon™ compound. Recently, we made one from walnut.

In the early days, you didn’t have the computerization that you now have in manufacturing, what did you do?
We made them all by hand on manual engine lathes. Sometimes as many as twenty a week all made by hand. I would make a trip out, sell some, come back, draw them up and the machinist would turn them out one by one by hand.

How many employees did you have then?
Four

How many do you have today?
121 talented people that are specially trained in tribological and lubrication techniques and have the necessary process know how. Our guideline to promote from within helps us cultivate and retain these resources and allows our customers to deal with people that know our company, our products and the way our products are used.

What happened in the next thirty years, something good happened, who was it, everybody?
As more and more end users began to understand the Inpro/Seal bearing isolator, its successes, along with its unique and irrefutable attributes have made it an Authentic product. With a well-earned international reputation for its ability to replace lip seals and other types of sealing methods that carry a 100% failure rate, bearing isolators have become a “Best Maintenance Practice”. As such, most of the Fortune 500 companies in the process industries and over half of the world’s industrial companies use Authentic Inpro/Seal products in critical maintenance roles.

What about your manufacturing facilities and equipment?
We completed a multi-million dollar expansion in 2003, which tripled our size in anticipation of stronger Bearing Isolator usage. Because Bearing Isolators are all we make, it is important to keep investing in the future. We now have the world’s largest facility devoted entirely to bearing isolation technology. Our 84,000 feet of manufacturing and office space includes: R & D, manufacturing, research lab, testing, engineering, shipping and support. This includes the latest in precision computer controlled (CNC) lathes, metal turning lathes, milling machines and sophisticated testing equipment. With a proprietary data bank of 60,000+ specifically engineered rotating equipment designs, Inpro/Seal has prints for every make, model, size and shape for any kind of rotating equipment made which dramatically speeds up the manufacturing and delivery process. In addition, we manufacture under stringent ISO 9001 conditions, the most stringent in the 9000 series.

Why so many designs?
That provides the basis for us to provide same day shipments of anything that the customer may require.

Why Is Same Day Shipping Important?
From day one, quick delivery has remained important. With a background in pump repair as well as pump sales, I knew (and still do) how important production continuity is. After all, when it comes to vital parts or downtime, there are very few plants that can wait until next week. To show how important downtime is, consider the process industries where downtime can run as high as $87,000 per hour.

How are you able to ship the same day?
What does it take? Does it cost more? To provide same day service on what could be a highly complex problem, we continue to invest in our facilities, our equipment, our people and bearing isolators, the only product we manufacture. To maintain a no extra cost, same day shipping option, we maintain a data bank of over 60,000 specifically engineered designs, also the largest of its kind. And if we don’t have a design, our highly sophisticated computer-aided equipment, combined with our process know-how and our engineering people allow us to develop a design within hours, sometimes minutes.

(Next month Dave talks about OEM relationships and some of Inpro/Seal's designs, Make sure to check it out!)

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