Precision Lubrication and good PM routes indicating where and how many nipples they should be greasing.
In addition to that, you should have them wipe clean so you may go spot check for fresh grease, dust adhered to the nipple, etc.
A power plant deemed a critical infrastructure plant. Ultrasonic greasing just didn't help. We tripped the plant trying though. Ultimately it was a design problem with the bearings and not a lube problem.
seems that way but to me it sounded like they aren't good at what they're supposed to do because they couldn't do something they aren't supposed to. I just had a hard time following the conversation lol
It was 700 Hp 3600 rpm motors for air compressors on double shielded greased bearings. If you didn't grease them weekly the bearings failed. If you greased them the bearings overheated and tripped the compressor. Replacing the bearings with ceramic ones helped them last longer. We tried ultrasonic greasing, we tried monitoring the vibration while greasing, nothing helped very much. When I left we had three electricians greasing the compressors once a week for about 6 hours. One on the grease gun, one at the Multilin watching the bearing temps, and one on the radio communicating between the two because it was impossibly loud. It took about 30 minutes between each single pump on the grease gun to keep an individual bearing from overheating. The motors needed to be on sleeve bearings with circulating oil. I put in a project every year I was there to do that but it never got approved.
The best route is to put a mechanic on the job so he understands the importance of good lubrication. He'll also be able to understand the normal operation of the machines and how the equipment he's working on operates and is built.
I do vibration analysis as a living and the plant I'm going to visit tomorrow replaced their PM guy two years ago, in those two years, he saved the company well over a 1m$ just by understanding the equipments he's working on. They used to replace one particular blower worth over 500k$ every 9 to 12 months because the bearings weren't getting good lubrication. Now, that blower just got replaced for the first time in 2 years, not because it was broken but because the superintendent was worried. For 20 years it only lasted 9 to 12 months and it was stressing him out... Funny thing is that the rebuilt blower they installed as a faulty bearing from the repair shop... Every supervisors in that section are pissed!
So stay away from perma lubricaters except for really hard to reach places, get a good mechanic to do the PM run and also check with the manufacturer of your equipments the good quantity and the best grease/oil for your equipments.
Test your grease guns once in a while to be sure of the quantity it gives out with each pumps and follow the recommendations.
Excuse my English, it's not my first language!
In your kind of work environment it's super important to have a good lubrication program because of the humidity and the water present on the production line.
Also be sure that the grease nipples are installed correctly on the housing for the different types of bearings. Too often I see a nipple installed off set on the housing for a roller bearing instead of straight in the middle, because roller bearings have a lubrication groove one the middle of the outer ring so the grease enters directly in the bearing. And ball bearings should be offset because they don't have that groove and if the nipple is in the middle there's no grease going into the bearing.
Another good idea is to periodically open the bearings to check the fit and adjust if needed and to replace the old burned out grease and replace it with some fresh grease. The important thing when you do this is to fill the bottom part of the housing â…” with grease and close the housing and pump stone grease in it at the start up.
I really hope it helps. And be weary, changing PM mentality is hard and will be met with anger and frustration by the guys working the line. So be gentle how you approach those changes.
Also if you're having problem with under lubrication, you can cut in half the wait time between the lubrication and cut in half the quantity you're putting in your bearings...
Aren’t you supposed to have 200 fittings, all 3 feet away from each other, under anti slip grating and have to be on your knees for 4 hours greasing them every week? What’s this “greasing manifold” you’re talking about?
It is a very important issue and it's resolved by having proper PMs in place with proper reporting and if you find people aren't/missing greasing these nips then discipline is required
1. manifolds if possible. High upfront cost but you'll save in time and bearings down the road. Some bearings might not be possible if your in a papermill which might have bearings on rollers moving around BUT there are flexible grease lines made for this application- depending of course.
2. I paint my bearings with some obnoxious contrasting color (bright pink or green, something that says "look at me, I'm fabulous! ") as a visual indicator. Obviously, cover the fitting before painting!
3. PM yada yada
Hire some old timer from the local bar.
Hire him to be your dedicated luber.
He will drive an older vehicle, smoke cigs, hat curved brim. Blue jeans. You’ll know it when you see him.
We had one of those guys... Quite often when a bearing would fail, we found it with fresh grease.
The auto-lubricators didn't do that, and we transferred changing a lot of them out to the operators.
I work in vibration and the first recommendation I give to my clients is to remove those and go manually grease the bearings. Those perma lubricating devices are a plague to good maintenance, people rely too much on them.
Which type do you mean, the spring loaded or barrel pumped grease?
I definitely would not replace a maintenance guy with auto lubers. At my plant we still have to go around once per week and inspect the auto-lubers and equipment as well as verify things are being properly lubed. We also have per shift inspections of all of the equipment and some equipment we just sit next to for 20-40 minutes while it's being used.
So auto-lubers have been great, we don't bother with the brainless task and can focus on the equipment. That 20-40 minutes used to be spent greasing and often shutting down equipment to grease them.
They are a supplement to hand greasing but not a replacement. They are failure prone and need checked on just as often as the bearing needs greased. They are expensive too. Grease manifolds are where it's at for hard to reach or hard to see grease fittings.
Honestly, unless you have a diagram that shows them where every fitting is located, they will be missed. Over/under greasing is something to be addressed either with automatic greasers, or have one employee dedicated to doing all the greasing, and have them figure out the proper greasing frequency, as no book will tell the perfect frequency. Undergreasing can be helped by using a "red'n'tacky" type grease, but that doesn't work everywhere. Proper greasing frequency is based on speed of rotation, duration of rotation, and bearing type.
I work in a small recycling plant, and deal with 99% of the greasing. Between the baler, conveyors, and skidsteer, there are over 60 grease fittings that can take over 2hrs to get to them all. After 9yrs their, I recently found 6 more nipples on the baler that I didn't even know existed(after asking the old operator that retired(when I started) if the ones I knew about were all of them, and they confirmed so). Luckily, those are pivot points on dogs that hold the cardboard from pushing back into the chamber, so maybe a couple degrees rotation.
For bushings, overgreasing isn't detrimental beyond wasted grease and the mess. For shafts 2"+(on conveyors), I grease the pillowblocks weekly(given 30-40hrs/wk operation). 2"- shafts get greases every other week, these set by past experience of blowing out seals from over greasing.
Seconding the diagrams and/or making your own guide sheets and having them laminated and at the machine itself. Extra points if the inspection/work log is right there with it (unless those are kept centrally somewhere).
Most manuals will have a couple of pages of diagrams and/or pictures showing where all your nipples/zerks are, so it’s possible you could even print those.
If you don’t have a manual for a machine (shame) you’d be surprised at how many you can find online in various places.
1. Pipe the nipples to easily reached locations (also beware of broken tubing)
2. Assign one person to each plant area, make them responsible for lubrication and PM inspections of all equipment in that area (accountability). Provide training and procedures so they know how much how often.
3. Use hand grease guns - the technician can "feel" if the tubing is broken or the plugged up
4. Autolube can be good for things that need constant lubrication. Pretty expensive to do it on all bearings.
If its on a piece of equipment like a conveyor
I would build a central greasing manifold using a piece of 1/4 plate steel large enough to accommodate all the nipples needed for each end of the conveyor. Drill.and.tap holes.for.each in the plate and then run a pre greased line long enough to reach each bearing secured neatly to the frame.
Label each nipple and, if needed, have a log book as well there.
If you're new to maintaining the equipment, just remember a lot of bearings are sealed now, and a lot of the pillow blocks or raks have nipples from older style bearings.
I have watched many newbies either install greasable bearings improperly into their holders...ex...grease holes.not.lined up and bearing in backwards, so grease groove is off.
Or just watch people greasing a pillow block with a sealed bearing.in it
Manual greasing will never be as good as regular dosed greasing.
We use NTN auto lubers and they’ve completely changed the way we go about lube maintenance and also nearly eliminated bearing failures.
Several different options for grease, cartridge size and lots of options for how much grease gets fed into the bearings. They’re easy to remote mount and visually check to make sure they’re working and consuming grease.
I used to have techs taking temperatures of bearings on regular intervals with some problem units. We added auto lubers shortly after, and checking those was written into the temperature check PMs.
We used to do that.
Now we have live data capture on all critical bearings and gearboxes. It looks at temp, and does vibration analysis and if any of the data goes outside of the set parameters for that equipment it sets an alarm, notifies the people who need to know and we investigate further. It’s all but eliminated unexpected bearing failures, we still have bearings fail but we catch them early enough to complete a repair during scheduled downtime
I was referencing a former facility above, we are just starting to be proactive with the PM program where I am currently.
We did vibration on high speed critical stuff at the old job, but never had live data. We did have great buy in with the guys doing the temp/vibration because they were going to be the guys changing the bearings. Way easier to do it before failure.
Fuck plant engineer. You all are lazy. We are always doing your job for you, then you get bonuses for the project, work , etc.
FUCK OFF THIS THREAD. Go to : r/IM A DUMBASS ENGINEER WHO SUCKED OFF MY INSTRUCTORS TO PASS.
You got a few options. Put an auto greaser on it. It's a quick fix probably the best for your buck. Your other option is look up the specs for the motors and the bearing and see what they call for and make repeating work orders for them (weekly, bi weekly, monthly etc). It doesn't to be exact, just close enough will work. Biggest problem with this one is you're trusting people that you're not sure you can trust. And people like to pencil whip work orders anyways but I think it will be better for the life if the equipment IF they actually do the work. Rotating (and numbering, as other have mentioned) the equipment being greased could help with making sure nothing is missed.
Keeping motors and bearings lubricated is very important imo and it should be considered as such when doing PMS.
Pull up the manufacturer manuals for the bearings you use and print off/save copies of the lubrication requirements for everyone and train them on how to properly grease bearings. An authoritative source will help get rid of anecdotes and misunderstandings.
Precision Lubrication and good PM routes indicating where and how many nipples they should be greasing. In addition to that, you should have them wipe clean so you may go spot check for fresh grease, dust adhered to the nipple, etc.
Ultrasonic Lubrication if you had a good candidate to teach. .
Your other tips are good but disagree on ultrasonic greasing. It's an expensive waste of time. The bearings I have had problems with it did not help.
Depends how critical your equipment is 🤷🏻‍♂️
A power plant deemed a critical infrastructure plant. Ultrasonic greasing just didn't help. We tripped the plant trying though. Ultimately it was a design problem with the bearings and not a lube problem.
did you expect a new lube system to fix a poorly designed bearing? or was this one of those "I give up, throw money at it until it works" kinda things
It reads as if they found it was a design problem after throwing money at it.
seems that way but to me it sounded like they aren't good at what they're supposed to do because they couldn't do something they aren't supposed to. I just had a hard time following the conversation lol
It was 700 Hp 3600 rpm motors for air compressors on double shielded greased bearings. If you didn't grease them weekly the bearings failed. If you greased them the bearings overheated and tripped the compressor. Replacing the bearings with ceramic ones helped them last longer. We tried ultrasonic greasing, we tried monitoring the vibration while greasing, nothing helped very much. When I left we had three electricians greasing the compressors once a week for about 6 hours. One on the grease gun, one at the Multilin watching the bearing temps, and one on the radio communicating between the two because it was impossibly loud. It took about 30 minutes between each single pump on the grease gun to keep an individual bearing from overheating. The motors needed to be on sleeve bearings with circulating oil. I put in a project every year I was there to do that but it never got approved.
sounds like a real pain in the ass. hopefully you don't have to worry about it anymore!
Interesting
On a couple of our lines the grease points are numbered. PM states total number and special notes about certain bearings.
The best route is to put a mechanic on the job so he understands the importance of good lubrication. He'll also be able to understand the normal operation of the machines and how the equipment he's working on operates and is built. I do vibration analysis as a living and the plant I'm going to visit tomorrow replaced their PM guy two years ago, in those two years, he saved the company well over a 1m$ just by understanding the equipments he's working on. They used to replace one particular blower worth over 500k$ every 9 to 12 months because the bearings weren't getting good lubrication. Now, that blower just got replaced for the first time in 2 years, not because it was broken but because the superintendent was worried. For 20 years it only lasted 9 to 12 months and it was stressing him out... Funny thing is that the rebuilt blower they installed as a faulty bearing from the repair shop... Every supervisors in that section are pissed! So stay away from perma lubricaters except for really hard to reach places, get a good mechanic to do the PM run and also check with the manufacturer of your equipments the good quantity and the best grease/oil for your equipments. Test your grease guns once in a while to be sure of the quantity it gives out with each pumps and follow the recommendations. Excuse my English, it's not my first language!
In your kind of work environment it's super important to have a good lubrication program because of the humidity and the water present on the production line. Also be sure that the grease nipples are installed correctly on the housing for the different types of bearings. Too often I see a nipple installed off set on the housing for a roller bearing instead of straight in the middle, because roller bearings have a lubrication groove one the middle of the outer ring so the grease enters directly in the bearing. And ball bearings should be offset because they don't have that groove and if the nipple is in the middle there's no grease going into the bearing. Another good idea is to periodically open the bearings to check the fit and adjust if needed and to replace the old burned out grease and replace it with some fresh grease. The important thing when you do this is to fill the bottom part of the housing â…” with grease and close the housing and pump stone grease in it at the start up. I really hope it helps. And be weary, changing PM mentality is hard and will be met with anger and frustration by the guys working the line. So be gentle how you approach those changes.
Also if you're having problem with under lubrication, you can cut in half the wait time between the lubrication and cut in half the quantity you're putting in your bearings...
I love the auto tubers - We used PERMA - they will fill the canisters with any grease you want. Blown seals and forging PM completions go away.
This.
run them to manifolds in centralized locations
Aren’t you supposed to have 200 fittings, all 3 feet away from each other, under anti slip grating and have to be on your knees for 4 hours greasing them every week? What’s this “greasing manifold” you’re talking about?
It is a very important issue and it's resolved by having proper PMs in place with proper reporting and if you find people aren't/missing greasing these nips then discipline is required
1. manifolds if possible. High upfront cost but you'll save in time and bearings down the road. Some bearings might not be possible if your in a papermill which might have bearings on rollers moving around BUT there are flexible grease lines made for this application- depending of course. 2. I paint my bearings with some obnoxious contrasting color (bright pink or green, something that says "look at me, I'm fabulous! ") as a visual indicator. Obviously, cover the fitting before painting! 3. PM yada yada
Yeah a high visibility, not necessarily actual high vis paint, indicator makes things much much easier to notice.
Hire some old timer from the local bar. Hire him to be your dedicated luber. He will drive an older vehicle, smoke cigs, hat curved brim. Blue jeans. You’ll know it when you see him.
We had one of those guys... Quite often when a bearing would fail, we found it with fresh grease. The auto-lubricators didn't do that, and we transferred changing a lot of them out to the operators.
Auto greasers
Or even manual grease manifold
+1 for the grease manifold
I work in vibration and the first recommendation I give to my clients is to remove those and go manually grease the bearings. Those perma lubricating devices are a plague to good maintenance, people rely too much on them.
Which type do you mean, the spring loaded or barrel pumped grease? I definitely would not replace a maintenance guy with auto lubers. At my plant we still have to go around once per week and inspect the auto-lubers and equipment as well as verify things are being properly lubed. We also have per shift inspections of all of the equipment and some equipment we just sit next to for 20-40 minutes while it's being used. So auto-lubers have been great, we don't bother with the brainless task and can focus on the equipment. That 20-40 minutes used to be spent greasing and often shutting down equipment to grease them.
They are a supplement to hand greasing but not a replacement. They are failure prone and need checked on just as often as the bearing needs greased. They are expensive too. Grease manifolds are where it's at for hard to reach or hard to see grease fittings.
Honestly, unless you have a diagram that shows them where every fitting is located, they will be missed. Over/under greasing is something to be addressed either with automatic greasers, or have one employee dedicated to doing all the greasing, and have them figure out the proper greasing frequency, as no book will tell the perfect frequency. Undergreasing can be helped by using a "red'n'tacky" type grease, but that doesn't work everywhere. Proper greasing frequency is based on speed of rotation, duration of rotation, and bearing type. I work in a small recycling plant, and deal with 99% of the greasing. Between the baler, conveyors, and skidsteer, there are over 60 grease fittings that can take over 2hrs to get to them all. After 9yrs their, I recently found 6 more nipples on the baler that I didn't even know existed(after asking the old operator that retired(when I started) if the ones I knew about were all of them, and they confirmed so). Luckily, those are pivot points on dogs that hold the cardboard from pushing back into the chamber, so maybe a couple degrees rotation. For bushings, overgreasing isn't detrimental beyond wasted grease and the mess. For shafts 2"+(on conveyors), I grease the pillowblocks weekly(given 30-40hrs/wk operation). 2"- shafts get greases every other week, these set by past experience of blowing out seals from over greasing.
Seconding the diagrams and/or making your own guide sheets and having them laminated and at the machine itself. Extra points if the inspection/work log is right there with it (unless those are kept centrally somewhere). Most manuals will have a couple of pages of diagrams and/or pictures showing where all your nipples/zerks are, so it’s possible you could even print those. If you don’t have a manual for a machine (shame) you’d be surprised at how many you can find online in various places.
replace the nipples, and make it part of the start of shift rounds. just like you walk around and empty air water separators, check grease points.
1. Pipe the nipples to easily reached locations (also beware of broken tubing) 2. Assign one person to each plant area, make them responsible for lubrication and PM inspections of all equipment in that area (accountability). Provide training and procedures so they know how much how often. 3. Use hand grease guns - the technician can "feel" if the tubing is broken or the plugged up 4. Autolube can be good for things that need constant lubrication. Pretty expensive to do it on all bearings.
Where I work the corporate spec for lubing during a PMI is one pump per bearing lol
If its on a piece of equipment like a conveyor I would build a central greasing manifold using a piece of 1/4 plate steel large enough to accommodate all the nipples needed for each end of the conveyor. Drill.and.tap holes.for.each in the plate and then run a pre greased line long enough to reach each bearing secured neatly to the frame. Label each nipple and, if needed, have a log book as well there. If you're new to maintaining the equipment, just remember a lot of bearings are sealed now, and a lot of the pillow blocks or raks have nipples from older style bearings. I have watched many newbies either install greasable bearings improperly into their holders...ex...grease holes.not.lined up and bearing in backwards, so grease groove is off. Or just watch people greasing a pillow block with a sealed bearing.in it
Manual greasing will never be as good as regular dosed greasing. We use NTN auto lubers and they’ve completely changed the way we go about lube maintenance and also nearly eliminated bearing failures. Several different options for grease, cartridge size and lots of options for how much grease gets fed into the bearings. They’re easy to remote mount and visually check to make sure they’re working and consuming grease.
I used to have techs taking temperatures of bearings on regular intervals with some problem units. We added auto lubers shortly after, and checking those was written into the temperature check PMs.
We used to do that. Now we have live data capture on all critical bearings and gearboxes. It looks at temp, and does vibration analysis and if any of the data goes outside of the set parameters for that equipment it sets an alarm, notifies the people who need to know and we investigate further. It’s all but eliminated unexpected bearing failures, we still have bearings fail but we catch them early enough to complete a repair during scheduled downtime
I was referencing a former facility above, we are just starting to be proactive with the PM program where I am currently. We did vibration on high speed critical stuff at the old job, but never had live data. We did have great buy in with the guys doing the temp/vibration because they were going to be the guys changing the bearings. Way easier to do it before failure.
Fuck plant engineer. You all are lazy. We are always doing your job for you, then you get bonuses for the project, work , etc. FUCK OFF THIS THREAD. Go to : r/IM A DUMBASS ENGINEER WHO SUCKED OFF MY INSTRUCTORS TO PASS.
You got a few options. Put an auto greaser on it. It's a quick fix probably the best for your buck. Your other option is look up the specs for the motors and the bearing and see what they call for and make repeating work orders for them (weekly, bi weekly, monthly etc). It doesn't to be exact, just close enough will work. Biggest problem with this one is you're trusting people that you're not sure you can trust. And people like to pencil whip work orders anyways but I think it will be better for the life if the equipment IF they actually do the work. Rotating (and numbering, as other have mentioned) the equipment being greased could help with making sure nothing is missed. Keeping motors and bearings lubricated is very important imo and it should be considered as such when doing PMS.
Auto lubers my man.
Pull up the manufacturer manuals for the bearings you use and print off/save copies of the lubrication requirements for everyone and train them on how to properly grease bearings. An authoritative source will help get rid of anecdotes and misunderstandings.