Sorry for the bit of marine preservation here, but it is a former Lehigh Valley Tug so I think it counts here.

Anyway, Last week on our way to a job (Still a working boat as much of a historic piece), we had a bearing failure on the aft end of the main generator. Its a 5x5 babbit bearing. We came to the conclusion the valve on top of the bearing worked its way closed, leading to a total failure. Thankfully we were 5 minutes away from a dock. We got it cooled with towels and shut it down, but the bearing was fried, however the shaft did not take a hit.

One of our engineers, only last month, built a machine used for centrifugally casting bearings after doing several months of research. The main purpose of this was to be able to make new bearings for another boat with an ultra rare, Fairbanks Morse 35F10M engine.

Anyway, here is a gallery, including some videos of the entire process. It just goes to show you dont need a major shop to do all this stuff..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25987785@N ... 453307776/

Never apologize for marine preservation ... thanks for the link.