Category Archives: Uncategorized

In keeping with last week’s theme on the use of strobe lights, this week we have an example of how you can use a strobe light to identify belt slip.  Did you know a 15% belt slip on a 100hp piece of machinery is not only reducing the motor 15 horsepower it could also potentially costContinue reading “Do Your Belts Slip and What is the Cost?”

Why Precision Maintenance®?  Did you know according to the Nowlan and Heap study 89% of all failures occur in a random nature. Looking within the famous “6 patterns of machinery failure” you’ll notice that 68% of machinery failures follow “Pattern F”.  Within pattern F the majority of failures are due to infant mortality. This means that by eliminating theseContinue reading “An Introduction to Precision Maintenance®”

Does your facility suffer from SCL and maybe you don’t know about it?  It’s an insidious failure mode that might be causing you grief and you may not know about it or maybe you have just come to accept it as part of doing business. We were working with a brewery and we asked the studentsContinue reading “Is Your Reliability Suffering due to SCL?”

If not, why not? Bearing failures are a very common form of mechanical breakdown. Apart from identifying that the failure is occurring using a variety of techniques and tools, we rarely take the steps necessary to understanding and prevent the failure from happening again in the future. We can learn a lot about why a bearing failed by simplyContinue reading “Do You Look at Failed Bearings?”

Hello All and thanks for the responses to last weeks Brain Teaser. The correct answer was water marks caused by water intrusion followed by the motor then sitting for a period of time. The brown staining noticed by some was likely tarnish deposits cause by breakdown of the lubricant presumably due to the same waterContinue reading “Last Weeks Brain Teaser”

An interesting exercise is to go and review a dozen or so of your completed “operator care” round sheets (Electronic or paper). Assuming you could find them, what (useful) information did they contain?  Too many times we visit facilities where machinery inspections (look listen feel) are in full swing, but the information they provide isContinue reading “Putting Thought Back into Machinery Inspections”

We now have a wide variety tools to help us perform Precision Maintenance® on belt driven machines. These include laser alignment to optimize the alignment of the pulleys, sonic tension gauges to optimize the static tension of the belts, but what about wear on the pulleys?We often just look at it and make a judgementContinue reading “Checking Sheave Wear… the Forgotten Part of Belt Maintenance”

With all the technology available to us today to determine the health of our assets, it is quite easy to lose sight of the fundamental approach of how to truly analyze a problem. Our need for immediate answers has tended to push us towards making snap judgements based on the limited data available. The currentContinue reading “How Well Do Your Analysts Understand the Analysis Process?”

We have all had the situation where, as a maintenance department, we have inherited from a project or new construction, a piece of equipment or asset that is in a less than reliable state. We then spend years and countless dollars and energy trying to manage it. Some believe that if we just do conditionContinue reading “Managing our Assets Cradle to Grave”