Maintenance Products

Article written by Christer Idhammar  President, IDCON, Inc., a maintenance management consulting and training company.Further information is available by contacting This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Most maintenance organizations are overstaffed, not necessarily with own staff, but they use more total maintenance hours than necessary. Total maintenance hours include your own internal hours, overtime hours and contractor hours. As an example a newsprint mill making 500,000 tons recycled paper per year is very good at less than 0.3 total maintenance hours per ton while most operations we have been working with are using over 0.5 total maintenance hours per ton.

If you work in a highly reactive maintenance organization you will be trapped in a circle of despair and you are wasting too much time on doing the wrong things. A circle of despair is when you have to react to a problem on a short notice. You then have to correct the problem as fast as possible; the quality of the correction will then be less than perfect. This leads to that it soon has to be repaired again and this circle of despair will continue and absorb all time you could have used to do the right things.

By Frank Mowka
Applications Engineer
FAG Bearings Corp., Danbury, CT
 
Automatic lubricators can be installed on most applications that require greasing maintenance. Here, a worker adjusts the lubricator on a honing machine for bearing manufacture. 
Nearly 90% of all bearings are lubricated with grease and 80% of all bearing failures are lubrication-related. Therefore, a crucial aspect of preventive maintenance is ensuring that bearings are maintained at proper lubrication levels, with adequate grease to help keep out water, dust and other contaminants. But it's as important to understand how much and how often a lubricant should be delivered as it is to know the type.

Unfortunately, in many applications proper lubrication is not a high priority. This is often due to bearing inaccessibility or because bearings cannot be lubricated until the equipment stops operating. At the same time, grease amounts - both over-greasing and under-greasing - are also potential causes of bearing failures.

Philip Heine from T Cards Direct explains why many companies go for a simple approach to coordinating Engineering Staff and Health & Safety