One of the things that we commonly see when we are working on site with customers is that equipment bases seem to get overlooked. It isn’t that they aren’t important; I tend to think that they get overlooked because they can deteriorate so slowly. There is a parallel here to road infrastructure in North America. The roads and bridges deteriorate so slowly, that we stop inspecting or fail to notice the deterioration because we’re not looking for it. We tend to take them for granted. Just like bridge repairs, repairing or replacing a machine base is no easy task. It’s disruptive, capital intensive and time consuming. So it’s better to find this failure early rather than later.
Many equipment bases are made up of a combination of concrete and steel. This combination of provides the stiffness and support for rotating equipment above it. Concrete and steel deteriorate quite slowly, we are usually talking years here not days or even months. As a result, we don’t see rapid deterioration and we tend to take bases bases for granted. Plus, if you were to look them frequently you wouldn’t see any change, and after a while we tend to stop looking and you would miss the deterioration again.
So, what’s the solution? Ensure that you have an annual machine base inspection route or pm in place so potential problems can be identified before they become big problems. Repairing or replacing a machine base is a big task and its helpful to have a long lead time to get bases fabricated for what is usually a capital job. Click on this linkIf you want to see some of the items that we look for when we are inspecting machines bases and check out some beauty’s we’ve found in the past. https://kvgo.com/Example/Inspect_bases