High cutting speeds and feeds are essential requirements of a machine tool structure to accomplish its basic function which is to produce a workpiece of the required geometric form with an acceptable surface finish at as high a rate of production as is economically possible. Since the bearings in high speed spindle units are the main heat source of the total cutting system, in this work, the thermal characteristics of the spindle bearing system with a tilting axis were investigated using finite element methods to improve the performance of the spindle bearing system. Based on the theoretical results, a specially designed prototype spindle bearing system has been manufactured. Using the manufactured spindle bearing system, the thermal characteristics were measured. From the comparison of the experimental results with the theoretical ones, it was found that the finite element method predicted well the thermal characteristics of the spindle bearing system.