The bearing puller is a tool used to remove bearing sets from rotating machine shafts or blind holes. The most common application is to remove a set of cage-type ball or tapered bearings from a rotating shaft, for example in automobile gearboxes. These tools are made of tool-grade steel and are therefore harder than the parts used. They are usually manual, with a handle on the steering screw, or an outer hexagonal end that matches the drive slot. Some bearing pullers are hydraulically driven, using a hydraulically driven piston to press against the end of the shaft where the bearing is located.
There is also a small version of the bearing puller, which is used to disassemble the millimeter-level bearings in small fractional horsepower motors and fishing reels. There are arms with extensions that allow the user to also pull in the inner ring. It is best to drive from the inner ring because it is firmly fixed to the shaft, while the outer ring is not well fixed to the rest of the bearing assembly.
species
Types of bearing pullers include bearing dividers, two-arm and three-arm bearing pullers, and internal bearing pullers.
Bearing separation plate
The bearing separator is the safest type of bearing remover. Technically, they are not pullers, but pushers, because they use wedges to push the bearing in and out of the shaft. They consist of two half-plates, which are fixed together by two long and large-diameter heavy-duty screws with nuts on all four ends. There is a hole in the middle of the plate and it is ground down towards the hole in the center, so when you screw the two plates together on the outside, the tool will wedge and apply upward thrust to the inner ring of the bearing. If there are gears or hubs directly behind the bearing, these bearings work best, so that when the upward thrust pushes the inner bearing race, one end of the tool can be held in place.
Two-arm and three-arm bearing pullers
These are the most common types of bearing pullers and can be used to pull gears or bearings. The end of the arm has a finger, which bends to roll back into the bearing. The center screw of the puller has been tightened so it is pushed to the top of the shaft, and an upward thrust is applied to the race of the bearing. The arms and fingers are interchangeable, so the same puller can adapt to various bearing and shaft sizes and lengths.
Inner bearing puller
The internal bearing puller is used to extract bearing sets, bushings or simple bronze sleeves from blind holes. Blind holes cannot use a punch to push out the sleeve or bearing. Internal bearing pullers are usually similar to small pit pullers because they have sliding hammers along the shaft to apply upward thrust and impact to the bearing. The collet is retractable and the collet is the part of the bearing that enters the tip of the puller shaft. The user can usually lock the collet in the bearing or bushing by tightening the collet on the puller shaft. By removing the sliding hammer from the bearing and moving upward in the direction of the user, the hammer of the tool transmits the upward thrust to the bush and pulls it out of the hole.
