Gear Motions Inc. has announced a joint venture with KBE⁺ Inc., an engineering consulting firm that specializes in the design and development of gear trains and power transmission devices. The companies have reached an exclusive agreement to utilize each other’s specialties in their ongoing business operations.

“This is the perfect merger of more than 50 years of collective KBE⁺ experience and more than 100 years of Gear Motions’ application experience,” said Gear Motions President and CEO Sam Haines.

Dr. William Mark McVea, president and founder of KBE⁺, has a wide range of experience in power transmission fields, including work as an off-highway drive trains design engineer and a design and research engineer with New Venture Gear. He has also been responsible for program development production at the Torsen Drives division of the Gleason Works.

“The addition of Dr. McVea to our precision gear manufacturing program helps broaden the services that Gear Motions offers its customers,” said Dean Burrows, president of Nixon Gear, part of the Gear Motions network. “By offering the capability to design, we can provide to our customers a full-service platform from design, through testing, into prototypes, full-scale production and service. More importantly, his vast experience will further allow us to review and develop new designs on the front end of the process, when there is greater opportunity for maximizing the cost/performance equation.”

After design completion, KBE⁺ provides full simulation and analysis using state-of-the-art software and computational techniques. Full on-premise laboratory facilities are used to verify and test any design or system. If a client prefers to use its own test facilities, on-site test engineering liaison services and independent results validation is available.

Gear Motions also recently announced its acquisition of Pro-Gear Co. Inc. in Buffalo, NY. Pro-Gear is a gear manufacturer for original equipment manufacturers such as Mack Truck, and also provides quick-turnaround gear grinding services for gear manufacturers that need additional capacity or companies that need external gear grinding services.