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Posted by D. Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 20:28:31 :
In Reply to: Military part number reference posted by Joe Cimoch [68.116.181.98] on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 17:14:30 :
A modern NSN is in the form of the last one you listed, AAAA-BB-CCC-DDDD. For all the old vehicles, the BB part is "00", and if you find older marked parts, they'll leave that off entirely (AAAA-CCC-DDDD). The oldest vehicles I know of with "01" for the BB part are HMMWVs. I have never seen a part with other than a 00 or 01 in the "B" part, so your "99" part number is not an NSN. I have a vague recollection that the B part is also used for identifying the European country (or NATO?) that has specified the part, so that the full 9-digit NSNs are unique even when the US and NATO are combined.
The A part is the federal supply code, which classifies it as the type of part. The link below goes to a list of FSCs. You can look the A part up there to see if your part is at least something that could conceivably be put in that FSC. 3120 is "bearing, plain, unmounted", which I'm thinking includes rod and main bearings, but not ball or roller bearings.
I do not know of any good universal listing of NSNs, especially not any "where used" info, which is what would be most helpful. There used to be a site called MilDocs.com that was somewhat helpful but it appears to be defunct. iso-parts.com will sometimes give you a manufacturer's part number cross reference, which can be helpful. If you see a "cage code", that's the code for the manufacturer, as near as I can tell.
I don't know if this is universally true, but I have found many old "ordnance part numbers" that are identical to the CCC-DDDD part of the NSN. Perhaps when they switched from ord #'s to NSNs, they brought the old numbers in and just put an FSC in front of them.