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Throughout our industry, technicians and maintenance personnel have been guided by various myths on how to lubricate their rolling elements.  Some do take their time and try their best to calculate the correct amount, but in this day and age where we all have to do more with less, there is a drop in the quality of data provided to these important craftsmen.

One-shot-lubrication-bandit

After visiting various facilities across the country, you hear different answers in regard to the proper greasing of bearings. One that caught my attention was someone who asked me about the one-shot bandit.  I had heard many terms in the industry but not that one. As I inquired, I figured it was the lubrication technician who pumps one shot, once a month. And there are the infamous three shots every three months time table provided to technicians. But nothing beats the one-shot, once-a-week for all bearings in a food processing facility I recently visited.

Let’s take a step back and take ownership of our craft. If we want to do more with less, we need to maximize the L10 bearing life. In order to do so, we need to ask the following questions before applying grease to any greasable bearing. They are:

  • Are the bearings in my work order greasable bearings?
  • Do we have the appropriate lubricant for the greasable bearing?
  • Do we have the correct grease applicator, also known as “grease-gun”?
  • Do we know how much grease is ejected by that “grease-gun” with each pump?
  • Do we know the total replenishment quantity for each bearing in our work order?
  • Do we know the current health of that bearing before inserting grease into the bearing?

Once we can answer these questions thoroughly and precisely, we should outfit our lubrication technicians with the appropriate tools to do their job, which is to grease bearings right!  Hand them an ultrasound tool that will allow them to do precision acoustic lubrication.  Let’s all become LUBExperts!!

Stop being a one-shot bandit and download our 5-Step Acoustic Lubrication Procedure to provide you with an effective lubrication procedure to grease bearings right!

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by Alex Nino CRL