Bearings are everywhere— from toy dolls to barstools to robots performing brain surgery. You name it, and somewhere upstream or downstream bearings will be in play. But much like their gear counterparts, bearings usually go unnoticed in everyday life—until they fail. Or until, perhaps, you are the person charged with specifying and/or purchasing them for your company. And, there are bearings—and then there are bearings. The distinction being that while commodity-type bearings are prevalent in the marketplace, that’s not much help to you if you are looking for, say, special dimension or custom bearings. Indeed, commodity-application bearings are a big portion of what in the U.S. alone is approximately an $11 billion industry, which includes ball, roller and plain bearings (Source: Freedonia Group report). That’s a lot of bearings to keep track of. So it is little wonder that U.S. bearing associations have formed and evolved over the years to become major players in the industry for their selling and buying members—whether they are sellers or buyers.

That said, the breadth of knowledge of today’s bearing groups goes way beyond commodity bearings. They are fully capable of working with their members to identify the most complex bearings used in the most complex applications. Indeed, working in tandem, the associations do just about everything for their members—from publishing industry statistics to providing invaluable training in the often very complex world of bearings. In the United States the bearings associations work with members to provide training and education opportunities, standards updates (where they exist), lobbying and public policy initiatives, as well as regularly held business forecast functions and seminars, trade shows, and other networking opportunities. Aside from the above activities, however, bearings associations are, in essence, accomplished matchmakers; they exist to facilitate hooking up bearings buyers with bearings sellers, and to everyone’s mutual satisfaction and benefit. There are three such bearings organizations in the U.S.—the American Bearing Manufacturers Association (ABMA), the Bearing Specialists Association (BSA) and the Power Transmission Distribution Association (PTDA), with the latter involved in not only bearings but other power transmission components as well.