From a technological perspective, there typically aren't many EUREKA! breakthroughs in the "state of the gear industry" to report, and 2014 was really no different.

Here's everything you need to know about IMTS 2014, including an interview with Peter Eelman, AMT's VP of Exhibitions and Communications.

Many vets have the skills, but no place to apply them.

Apprenticeship programs are back in the USA - sort of.

When is a gear not a gear? Pardon my Zen, but that is a bit like asking, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Or there’s the old bromide, "If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck," etc. Just work with me here…

If you are like most navigators of the printed page, the first thing you read in this final 2013 issue of Gear Technology was our State of the Gear Industry Survey. And who would blame you? It’s not Sabermetrics, but once you’ve read it you’ll have a pretty clear snapshot of last year and a peek into the next. But if you also like to get a little closer to the bone about things, what follows are the collected opinions of five well-regarded people in the gear industry speaking to a number of issues with relevance.

Bearings ain't beanbag. They are complicated. They are big-business. They are often counterfeited. They are used in virtually anything that moves. But it is the "complicated" part that challenges OEMs, job shops and other operations, and, most of all, their employees. Add to that the countless other entities around the world that are intimately involved with bearings and you can arrive at a semblance of an idea of just how important these precious orbs can be to a successful operation.

The essence of designing gears is often by necessity risk-averse, given that many of them are used in applications where loss of life is a distinct possibility. The Gear Research Institute (GRI) at The Pennsylvania State University conducts risk reduction testing with the same goal in mind - whether it be gears in fighter jets, Ferris wheels, tanks, or countless other gear-reliant vehicles and machinery.

It’s been said that the best ideas are often someone else's. But with rebuilt, retrofitted, re-controlled or remanufactured machine tools, buyer beware and hold onto your wallet. Sourcing re-work vendors and their services can require just as much homework, if not necessarily dollars, as with just-off-the-showroom-floor machines.

It’s a brave, new hardware-software world out there. Players in the worldwide gear industry who don’t have plenty of both run the risk of becoming irrelevant—sooner than later.