tallguy: Sure, But my memory might be a little off. The problem with the big radials was tremendous loading of a large, 7 or 8 inch, roller bearing on the crankshaft or maybe in the propeller gearbox. Hyatt refurbished the bearings when the units were serviced on the FAA (?) time schedule. And there was a government inspector who was there to do the paperwork. He had his own desk.
Some one thought to stop the issue of the roller skidding across the area where the load was the greatest that grinding the race oval a slight amount would take the overload away from that contact point and spread it over the adjacent areas. And I believe this issue came about during the war as the power output kept being increased for more performance. I think this may have been the B-17 engine or the B-24 engine, but may have been the multi row B-29, I just don't remember. One that was still being used somewhere into the 60's.
So the inner portion of the outer race needed to be oval and the outer ring needed to be round. The outer races were held in a chuck on an internal spindle grinder.
The tooling solution was a spider fixture to deform the outer race into the oval shape. It may have been only a thousand or two, I don't remember. Than the inner surface ground round again with the outside deformed. And recording the diameter. When the spider is released the race returns to a round outer surface and the inside takes the oval. The area of oval was marked so that the install of that area was in the spot of high loading.
The inner race, being the one on a shaft, was kept round and reground and it's diameter recorded.
Than new rollers selected to have the running clearance right.
I believe that while I was there there were no new bearings being made of this type. All the ones we we had were rebuilds of the used stock supply. And production did not run on a continuos basis, but when enough units got backlogged they would do a run of them.
Frank