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Secrets of manual lubrication
If your lubrication PMs involve sending “Three-Shot Harry” out on the floor once a week, you might as well just shoot the grease on the floor and be done with it. Equipment lubrication has been regarded for so long as the domain of “Zen master” specialists that in the absence of such a guru, many lubrication programs end up being fully understood by no one. The reality is that this function is far too important to be misunderstood.
Even assuming your technician is applying the right lube for the job (a major assumption itself), how much is enough, how much is too much, and how often must he do it? What’s the secret?
Five factors combine to determine the ultimate success or failure of any lubrication program. They are known as the Five Rs: Right time, Right place, Right product, Right amount and Right attitude.
Learning to apply the Five Rs and design a world class lubrication program takes years of training and execution. Don’t have time “this week” to get there from here? Despair not: here are some tips from a world-class operation that you can apply to your program to begin to see results in the short term.
Scotty Lippert is the planned maintenance technician and lubrication systems leader for Clopay Plastic Products Company, which won the 2005 John R. Battle Award for Excellence in Machinery Lubrication. Here are few of his tips for improving the reliability of your lubrication PMs.
1: Right product
“The most important thing to know is whether you are putting the right grease in that bearing,” he says. “Putting the wrong grease in a bearing can dramatically shorten its life and certain bearings take different grease than others because of the applications, load, speed, environment and other factors. The only way to learn is through a lot of training. It’s not a fast process — it takes a long time.”
2: Right amount
“Before your technicians go out on the floor they need to know how much that grease gun is pumping,” Lippert advises. “Each grease gun will dispense a different amount so they all need to be calibrated before they are used.”
Clopay calibrates the volume of grease each gun dispenses per pump and marks that information right on the gun itself.
3: Right place, Right time
The next step is to know where each lubrication point is and how often it needs to be hit. Companies that utilize CMMS have an advantage here in that they provide a centralized bank for generating job plans and can greatly simplify the calculations required to arrive at the correct amounts and intervals of lubrication for each bearing.
Plus, once the information is input, it’s there. The flip side of this is that all that information — every lubrication point in the entire factory — must be entered correctly the first time. There are numerous horror stories of catastrophic failures because a critical Zerk was overlooked in the original mapping process.
“In our CMMS system, each bearing has a calculation for how much grease it needs and how often,” Lippert explains. “We use a formula SKF has developed to determine how much and how often a given bearing needs lubrication. That information goes into CMMS and kicks out on job plans every time lubrication is due. Our technicians take those job plans out and lubricate the machines according to the specs we’ve calculated.”
The job plans generated by the CMMS are available to technicians in several forms; electronically, in paper job plan printouts, and posted on boards in Clopay’s lube room.
The scheduling process and calculating lube volumes and intervals are not as easy for companies without CMMS or with systems that do not have lubrication modules, but the basic process remains the same. Map your entire plant; identify every lube point and calculate how much and how often it needs to be serviced. Then keep that information at hand where it can be easily found; on PM job plans, on TPM boards; and on laminated PM guides right on or next to the equipment on the floor.
Right attitude
Again, don’t expect to accomplish this overnight. In Clopay’s case, the process took three years. Understanding the true value, and making sure that understanding permeates your entire organization, is perhaps the most important element of a successful lubrication program.
One more tip: visual cues played a key role in making it happen. Remember all those Zerk fittings Clopay mapped out? They color coded each one according to the type of grease it requires. These colors correspond to colors of the grease guns themselves, so there is never any question about which lube to use in which fitting.
Information for this article was provided by Scotty Lippert of Clopay Plastic Products Company. He can be reached by e-mail at .
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Russian roulette
If it is contaminated, even the right lubricant in the right amount can wreak havoc on equipment.
According to Mark Hill, whose company is the North American distributor of iCan brand industrial fluid containers (www.intelligentcan.com), the first order of business in any lubrication program is not only to specify the right lubricant, but also to make sure it is delivered clean and kept clean.
It’s not uncommon, Hill says, to get a blank stare when you ask a lube tech how their lubricants were specified. The typical answer is, “It’s what we’ve always used.”
Twenty years ago, your lubricants might have done the job, but equipment today tends to run on tighter tolerances, not to mention that it may also be made from different materials. Equipment also tends to run faster, which means hotter. This means that a different type of lubricant may be called for.
Accordingly, maintenance leaders must review not just the types of lubricants being used, but also how clean they are. In some cases, virgin oil doesn’t meet the required cleanliness levels needed for a particular application. The only way to know how clean the oil needs to be is to know the clearances within the equipment. This is the true starting point.
“But don’t fool yourself,” Hill says. “Your work isn’t over.”
Once the correct oil is specified, and its cleanliness level is determined and documented (i.e. measured using oil analysis), now comes the hard part — keeping it clean while it’s being handled in the plant.
“This is almost always the weakest link in the chain,” Hill observes. “I’ve seen people pay thousands of dollars for a lube audit, thousands more changing out lubricants based upon the audit and then use unlabeled, open-top containers within the plant.”
It’s the lubrication equivalent of playing Russian roulette. If the container is unlabeled, then you don’t really know what’s in it. And if it’s not sealed, you don’t know what’s in the oil.
“Using incorrect or contaminated oil will wreak havoc on your equipment, so become disciplined and organized in the way you handle it,” Hill says.
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This article appeared in the February/March 2006 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2006.
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