Striving to ship orders within days of placing production order
WAUKEGAN, Ill., Jan. 17, 2025 – Meet Ray. He is PEER Chain’s machinist and CNC operator who has decades of experience specializing in boring industrial sprockets.
In addition to traditional commercial sprocket offerings, PEER Chain & Sprockets announces it now can custom bore any size sprocket that has an existing keyway and deliver them within days of order placement.
That sounds like an easy task, but Ray is repurposing inventory that already has existing keyways and set screws. This is a challenging machining process because of the existing keyway.
“The boring bar loves 100% material,” he said. “When boring a bigger hole in an existing sprocket, you have to drill through the existing keyway, and when you get through, the carbide is hit with a baseball bat-like crack,” said Ray. “You don’t want that because it could undermine the bore’s dimension. The carbide starts screaming and yelling at you until it finally hits material on the other side of the keyway. Our process takes the ‘baseball bat’ out of the game.”
PEER Chain provides a wide range of finished bore and plain bore sprockets. Finished bore sprockets are machined to American National Standards Institute (ANSI) specification tolerances with one keyway aligned to the center of a sprocket tooth and with two set screws. One set screw is centered on the keyway and the other at 90 degrees.
Fact MR, the globally recognized provider of high-quality market research, predicts the global sprocket market will nearly double to $9.6 billion in 2033.
Ray is mentoring other skill-driven employees on the boring lathe so they can quickly help customers with their immediate needs. “Often it’s our customers’ customers who need the sprocket yesterday, so when we can turn the project around for them in a day or two, it’s very satisfying,” he said. “If we didn’t have these sprockets already in-house, it could be up to a 20-week delay.”
PEER Chain, which is ISO 2001 certified, purchased the lathe to re-bore sprockets to reduce slow-moving inventory, said PEER President Drew Beadle. “We were able to bring Ray into our family fold, leveraging his experience to offer customers customized sprockets with no minimum order requirements. If they want a single sprocket with a certain imperial measure boring, we will produce it.”
Beadle said PEER has no limitations on customization of the finished size bore.
“For our customers, it’s all about speed to market,” Beadle commented.
About PEER Chain
In 1969, PEER Chain was spun off into independence. In 2025, celebrating its 56th anniversary, the four-generation family is a leading industrial chain and sprocket provider. The family holds many of the same values as their grandfather and founder Nate Spungen. Not all the same values because keeping up with the times helps PEER Chain continue to focus on the WOW for their employees and customers. It’s deep inventory stocks of all the major chains with and without attachments as well as popular sprockets is a key for not experiencing the supply chain issues that many companies did during the pandemic. PEER is committed to ship chains and sprockets when a customer needs them. Solutions begin with your phone call to PEER at +1 847.250.9249 or via the array of cloud possibilities.