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A few simple practices could help to prevent damage and contamination of your oil and grease: Error-proof the system by color coding and labeling the lubricants. Store in a climate-controlled environment. Store in a clean environment to prevent ingress contamination. Use the FIFO (First-In, First-Out) principle for usage, as lubricants do have a shelf life. […]

When a machine heats up and starts expanding in all directions is simply called thermal growth. When it actually comes to understanding it, it means that you are dealing with machinery movement and that can cause misalignment in the machine. Also, your alignment is only as good as your target. If your machine starts moving […]

A pump is a machine or device designed to move and transfer fluids. All pumps basically do the same thing, and the pump best suited for your needs depends on how far, how fast, and how much fluid needs to be transferred. Pumps are very critical to a facility as a whole and unwanted downtime […]

Machinery Lubrication • September 2022 Imagine buying a new car and not taking it for a test drive first. That might not be so bad, given the built-in protections covering the auto buyer these days. But what about buying industrial equipment? Purchasing a new machine and finding unexpected problems after installation and integration into your […]

IS PULLEY ALIGNMENT IMPORTANT FOR YOU? Most every running asset – no matter the mechanism used when coupled together – can be subject to misalignment between driver and driven components. Proper alignment of belt-driven equipment is often neglected by maintenance and even reliability departments even though pulley misalignment is a principal reason for reduced belt […]

A few simple practices could help to prevent damage to your spare bearings: Label bearings by type, size, bearing number, and date stored. Label shelves in accordance with in-house MRO guidelines. Maintain constant temperature and relative humidity. Store in a clean environment to prevent ingress contamination. Use oldest bearings first (FIFO). Use sealed bearings within […]

“Reliable machinery installation” – it sounds like an obvious thing, don’t you agree? But where does reliability actually start? We all know that “the thing” starts with the design. The design stage decides what is going to be installed. Which equipment, and where. But there is no decision on Who is going to perform the […]

In today’s world-class facilities, maintenance and reliability departments require data collection on a consistent and periodic basis to guarantee that assets in a plant operate efficiently and reliably. Vibration monitoring actively monitors the health of critical assets for potential failure conditions. This yields great results in identifying potential failure conditions for repair before unwanted downtime or […]

A topic I like to highlight and elaborate on during a training session is alignment tolerances. In my experience, I have found that most people involved in alignment don’t give tolerances much thought. Alignment tolerances are useful in that they give the technician doing the alignment a stopping point. But tolerances can vary widely: From […]

Precision Maintenance is one of the 15 foundational processes that is a must if you want to develop a complete maintenance system. Precision maintenance is the tasks that take place typically at commissioning or recommissioning to extend the life of an asset. Commissioning takes place at the initial startup of a newly installed asset or […]

Reliability groups are often expected to collect data on critical assets in a consistent manner to ensure the asset’s health is monitored efficiently, and to maximize the life of that equipment. Doing this task manually may pose a safety or health risk to the personnel responsible for collecting the data. One of the solutions is […]

We previously went over our glossary of alignment terms with, “What is Alignment? Check out our Glossary of Alignment Terminology from A-H!” and later with Alignment Terminology from I-R.  In the world of alignment, there is a multitude of technical terms. We provide definitions for some of these terms that you might hear from an engineer […]

Precision Maintenance can be used as a process improvement strategy. A strategy that will pay dividends. This process is easy to implement. In fact, you do most of the work already. The beauty of it all is that there is not a lot of cost involved and if you are smart, you can implement the […]

Unbalance can be caused by many possibilities such as listed below but not limited to just this list. Possible sources could be many more than those listed. Generally, if the rotor is dirty, clean it, as this alone may correct any unbalance. If it has damage fix it; if it’s loose tighten it, if a […]

If your machine’s gearbox, pump and motor shafts are not in alignment, the cost of failures and repairs can be drastic. Misalignment of this nature will significantly reduce its performance and mean time between repairs, as well as the functional longevity of the gearbox, motor, and the machines as a whole! It’s important to be […]

We previously went over our glossary of alignment terms with, “What is Alignment? Check out our Glossary of Alignment Terminology from A-H!” In this blog, we continue the alignment alphabet from I-R.  In the world of alignment, there is a multitude of technical terms. We provide definitions for some of these terms that you might hear […]

A few simple practices could help to prevent damage to your spare belts and chains: Label chains and belts by type, size, number, and date stored. Label shelves in accordance with in-house MRO guidelines. Maintain constant temperature and relative humidity. Store in a clean and dry environment to prevent ingress contamination. Keep belts out of […]

The following facts are principles that form the basis for the balancing of machinery. When a person determines that a rotating machine needs to be balanced, a few things should be kept in mind The vibration caused by imbalance always occurs at 1× RPM of the unbalanced rotor. The vibration is directly proportional to the […]

If we want to get into precision maintenance, we need to be aware of the differences between shaft alignment tolerances and coupling tolerances. I just recently read an article from an online Reliability Maintenance website. It’s from a well-known organization that sells training for Reliability Centered Maintenance and Condition Based Maintenance programs. The title read: […]

I recently spoke to a reliability engineer who was rolling out our alignment and vibration equipment to fifteen plants across the U.S. He involved us early on in the process. His company didn’t just set aside budget money for the equipment purchase, but also enough to properly train their field service personnel in how to […]