Reliability Gang Podcast
Welcome the #Reliabilitygang Podcast! I would like to welcome you all to my reliability journey. I am passionate about reliability and I want to share as much as I can with everyone with my experiences. Stories are powerful and my aim of this outlet is to gather as many insights and experiences and share them with the world. Thanks for joining the #reliabilitygang.
Reliability Gang Podcast
SOLVE - How solving the problem adds value to Reliability
Hi #reliabilitygang !
In this podcast we take you through all the services and offerings SOLVE has to offer, as we start to offer more at Maintain we thought it would be a good idea to take you through all the services that we do in our solve division.
Precision maintenance is the mantra at Maintain and as we start to try and close the loop on our recommendations in the DETECT side of the business we need to ensure that reliability is at the heart of our actions.
We disscuss
- The Repair Centre
- Planned Maintenance on site
- Engineerings services on site
- Precision Balancing and Laser Alignment
- How to correctly install bearings.
We hope you enjoy this episode guys and stay locked in for the next episode.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Reliability Gang podcast. I'm here with my right hand man, will Crane. How we keeping buddy Very well, thank you very much. It's been a minute, guys. It's been a minute, hasn't?
Speaker 2:it. We've been busy launching something.
Speaker 1:I know. I mean, the whole launch was just. It's weird sometimes when you get in these like we've never actually done something this big before, if that makes sense when we're building another business unit, building the processes, you don't realize the time, the time, the effort, the, the graft involved with just getting it set up and understanding how that type of you know business is going to work, because inherently it's just been so different to the condition morning side of what we're doing, isn't it? Do you know?
Speaker 2:I mean so you know you feel like we've kind of just like been running and running and running and now we've just hit that wall like boom. It's kind of like we've launched here. We're like, oh okay, and it's like we're here.
Speaker 1:I know yeah, it's a bit weird because it's, you're right, it's kind of all of that hard work that we've put into it and all of that kind of pre-thought of what do we need, how do we need to get it sorted, what, what do we need to make sure it's prepared for launch, so we are ready, and that's the. That's the. That's the hard thing when you're investing a lot of money, you know, into a business where you have to have all of the things that are able to do the job, because it's not just I need a data collector, I need someone who can you know, who's got good observations and and is trained and, you know, understands how to collect data.
Speaker 1:This is a complete well, a motor is a very different element in terms of repair to a gearbox. There's different elements in there. There's different failure modes in there. There's different things to understand and as well, obviously, since your brother's come on, he's been amazing. He's been so intrinsically important to this whole transition, but he's highly mechanical. So we've been doing a lot of training on the electrical side of motors and stuff and he's really picking up quite quickly. But until you had that exposure to that, it's really difficult because it's just new. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:So, like we talked about and I think everyone that's probably following us knows about Detect, Solve, Improve, but obviously this kind of episode. We're talking a bit more on that Solve side Since we've started with the repair centre. We're going to explore some of the things that we do a part of Solve. Yeah, yeah, You've kind of really looked after the repair centre.
Speaker 2:I have yeah, it's been my baby Do you want to talk a bit about what we do in the repair set now and why we started all of this, yeah, so obviously the vision for me was always detect, solve, improve.
Speaker 1:And when we kind of manifested this idea about two years ago, when we're looking at reliability and it all came from that transitional part of maintain condition monitor. And when you started because we did that very well, you know me and you were both I was level two. When you come on I got my level three. You still had a lot of experience in condition monitor and we were quite seasoned. When you first come on, you know we had quite a bit experience in that and one of the things we were finding that we were just given lots of problems and you know there was like it was difficult for us to see the value in it because it was like you know, the whole part of the reason why we were in COVID, weren't we as well?
Speaker 2:where a lot of maintenance teams were stripped back stripped back.
Speaker 1:They didn't have the availability and it was. You know. That's kind of where it was born, really, and I think where we've evolved. This is just from our experience. It's not something that has just come about and like oh, we'll do that. This is definitely based upon data that we've found with our customers and feedback, and feedback as well, because when you guys do that, yeah, and we were engineers, like we were mechanical engineers I've changed plenty of bearings in my time, and so have you.
Speaker 1:When you was in your apprenticeship with british sugar. That's where you started, that's what you did before you got in, and everything we did then was in-house. It was in-house, you was taught very well, you had a, and we had all this extra knowledge that we weren't able to utilize, do you? You know what I mean. So this is where the transition came. It was like right, we need to become more than this. We can start doing the recommendations, but what we did want to do and what we did have is a precision maintenance mindset, because everything we did, we wanted to be perfect and that was our.
Speaker 1:We have that weird OCD perfectionist side and it can be annoying. Actually. Sometimes you have to like, say not right now. I know, and it's do you know what? Having that extreme OCD in a business sometimes it's so difficult because you want everything to be perfect but it's not possible. So you're always trying to aim for that extra level, that higher level that doesn't actually sometimes exist. But the thing is what, when it comes to precision maintenance, we can provide a precision alignment to a certain tolerance and we can do that and we want to be able to achieve that and we understand that, if we do that, the difference it makes to reliability. So that's the whole transitional stage of maintaining condition monitoring to reliability. But then it was a case of well, great, we can now do a bit of this and we can solve the problems. And we changed bearings, we found electrical fluid.
Speaker 2:And it's quite rewarding as well if, when you've identified a problem, you're able to do it, and then you test it and you're like boom, yeah, made a difference.
Speaker 1:I mean it's that one we did for one of our customers big compressor. That was our first bearing change. That we did Electrical fluid. That we did electrical fluid that we found within the bearing. You know, we put a shaft current device and we it worked very well and and we've solved that, yeah, and we improved the reliability of that machine. We're still monitoring that till this day.
Speaker 1:I mean, that was defects, no defects, and it's still going and we regularly shaft current, test it as well, just to make sure the rings, the device working. Before then, every six months it was failing every six months. But that was what. That was the first job that we did. That was, wow, this model could work. We understood that it was a bearing defect, out-erased defect from our collector. We've gone in there, we've helped the customer on a shutdown period where it didn't impact their production and if their lot is compressed, the whole plant is down. This is like the holy grail on this side. They are very conscious of this and it's good that they know that it is a reliable. You know it is a critical piece of equipment that needs to be reliable. So when we did that, that gave me and you just this fire, didn't it? I mean, I think, and I suppose that was the birth of Solve. That was the birth of Solve Because the thing is for us, we love the condition monitoring and we love the identification, but what we didn't like was closing the loop.
Speaker 1:What we didn't like was when something did get repaired, where's the bearing? What, what happened? How do we know that change or that that that rectification has been done in a way that has actually made the client reliable, and we was missing that information quite a lot to 80% of the time that when we was requesting certain things, we weren't getting it. So the thing is, if we was in control of the whole thing, we could get the bearing, we could take it out, we could do a root cause analysis on that and then we could actually as well, when we are actually putting that back in or we're realigning something, we can understand the implications of what was done wrong, whether it's poor lubrication or whether it wasn't even fastened correctly I suppose that was like before we get onto repair center.
Speaker 2:That's when we really started offering engineering services as an as an offering. After that it was like we can there's two of us now a lot of the time of engineering stuff. You need an extra pair of hands sometimes if you're doing a heavy lift or something I remember we bought the caddy, didn't we?
Speaker 1:we bought the van for it for that purpose, because we was obviously at the time, had our cars and we was loading our cars with these tools, and it was, remember, my car was up on the floor oh my god, oxy is settling in these, not, and they're quite nice cars to be afraid of times.
Speaker 1:This is crazy. So what I did? I like right, I'm getting a van, and I drove that around the night, and then, whenever we had any um engineering jobs, I loved it. I loved the fact we could just load it full of.
Speaker 2:We started. We started doing all sorts of engineering services bearing replacements, yes, bearing paint on side. We did shaft current testing as well, which was a big one, because everyone that's moving on to VFDs.
Speaker 1:Huge one right now. I mean, I visit a customer you know this Monday and he won't even mind me mentioning him Lance, great guy, british Gyps. Remind me, mention him. Lance, great guy, british Gibson. Incredibly, just such an advocate for reliability this guy like honestly, he's so refreshing when you can have these conversations and he's done an amazing job, from the bottom as an apprentice, moved all the way up into the in terms of his position, where he is, with a real good rapport with his guys and great teamwork.
Speaker 1:And we're now looking at, you know, really, the top end of reliability, looking at the maintenance Juicy bits. We're now getting the froth, you know, but we're looking into. You know they've had some issues with some VFDs and some, you know, electrical currents and it is not a common thing. You know they've got a lot of motors on site but it's going to somewhere and it's random, it's very random and that's the thing you don't, that. That's the, because it's random. You have to be able to create a, a pm for it, a plan made in his task for it to be done regularly, depending on, I don't know, frequency. Wise is subject to to different, you know, different criticalities, but again, it still needs to be done all the time and that's something that we've identified and something that we're implementing.
Speaker 1:So we've done a lot for me, because on four kind of major aa kind of machines and we're now doing that extra bit but I suppose that's where solve does come into it a little bit, because they already have a condition monitoring program in a minute and I'll be honest, it's it's. It's effective, do you know? I mean, they don't get me wrong there's ideas that I could put in there, but it's doing its purpose in terms of identification of defects. So the idea is that of that is, if you know you do currently already have condition monitoring doesn't mean that we can't work with you. Yeah, I think that's a perfect example of a customer. We've come in and we're just having a look at the gaps that we can fill and we can come in and add value, you know.
Speaker 2:But that's because we're not a condition monitoring company. We're not.
Speaker 1:We're a liability company and that's why the transition was so important, because you know, if you can't transition to that solution place, what are what are you actually effectively doing? You're you're identifying things, but you're identifying problems. We need to be solution-based people and that's always been something that we've been passionate about. Yeah, this is why we had to build a repair center. Yeah, because when it comes to a stage where you are on site or there is a job and there's something that can't be done on site reliably, you need to have or the right environment or the environment to be able to do so. You need to have somewhere that allows you to be able to do that repair in a reliable way and something that you can as well measure. You know, measuring the tolerances of the housings, measuring all these things and having a standard as well to that to say, look, if it does exceed this and the same with the winding Traceability as well.
Speaker 1:Traceability, you know we had a submersible pump in the other day and Harry was working on that last week. And you know, mega ADX tester beautiful piece of equipment identified and when we were surge testing this particular winding right about 1,800 volts on the surge test there were sparks within a turn-to-turn fault, right? Oh, wow. So when we megged this out, if you just megged it with a normal mega, you would not have seen that defect, 100% not, but it's not been seen. So this is another thing why you know, I spoke to michael herring as well.
Speaker 1:Incredible, credible, incredibly knowledgeable guy. Right, you come over teach me and harry for a good two hours, three hours, and it was a great session about teaching of why surge testing is so important, because turn to turn shorts are very, very common. They're the ones that are going to kill your winding. Essentially okay, and if you're just doing general resistance checks between you know on your phases, or you're doing insulation resistance checks between phases, it's not taking into account turn to turn right, and this adx tester that we've got in the workshop, we can take this to site as well, can't?
Speaker 1:we can, and we can do like motor stores and stuff like that, and this is a discussion I was having with Lance as well. So obviously they've got a plan maintenance function for that AA critical kit of where they do go and they do do mega checks but they don't surge test. So now you've got an element there of a potential failure on a critical piece of equipment for turn-to-turn shorts. Right, that's not being covered. So that's something that we're implementing back into that to make it improve it a little bit. Do you know what I mean? So it's now about looking at all of the processes and looking at all of the failure modes, because you can't just assume, okay, you might identify in your Fumica that, okay, the winding can fail, but you almost need to look at how it can fail and every avenue. So rather than saying, oh, we're just going to mega it, well, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:That's your cause part, isn't it? When you say winding might fail, what is the cause?
Speaker 1:What's the cause? Turn to turn, turn this Face to face Overload. Do you know what I mean? There's, but this is where for me, because it can get complicated, because if you don't fully understand the elements of electric motor, how do you know how it can fail? Does that make sense? So I think this is where we become a little bit more kind of intuitive into the fact that we can do this a little bit more strategically, in the sense that we understand how a motor works. We understand how a gearbox works in terms of its functions, in terms of pinion gears and gear mesh frequencies and what's the importance of oil.
Speaker 1:We're kind of not looking at it as just a consultancy point of view and coming in and just doing our rpn and just saying, oh, what's the risk, and just kind of whacking in figures and data. We're looking at each case as an actual engineer. Do you know? I mean, and that's that's, that's rare. I don't feel that everyone can give that perspective of things, and I think that's exciting for us. It comes from a place of experience though, doesn't it? It does. You can't buy it. You've got to be in the field, you've got to be testing these motors, you've got to go and do the seminar with bloody Michael to tell you about these things. And of course he's out there to sell these pieces of equipment. But their sales strategy does really go on the fact that you know you need to do these things for reliability and that's what everybody's looking for. So you know the identification of that turn to turn defect incredible.
Speaker 1:And I know what a lot of people might say. They might say, well, the motor's only running 415, but every time you start that pump it's that surge current can get easily even above 2000 volts. And you have to remember we're testing DC, that's AC voltage going through that winding. So every time you start that mower the potentiality in terms of that fluctuation in voltage can reach up to that. So this is where the reason why we test at 2000, because that's generally on the start the max potential.
Speaker 1:I mean I'm not saying that's the same for every winding, but there's a potentiality with it. So this is why we set that standard at 2000 volts and say if it doesn't exceed that we can't put it back in. Because how can you trust that you can't? It's unreliable. So now we have to get it rewound. We get back back to the standard it should be, do you know? I mean? And then we do the mechanical part as well, with extreme precision as well, make sure everything is done properly, the bearings are fitted properly with proper induction heaters, and we've got a process in terms of how we install bearings and how we put things together.
Speaker 2:That's that precision maintenance part, isn't it? We, you know, we use proper installation techniques for bearings. We do laser alignment. We've just got our delivery of our new alignment. We have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, akuem. Um, we've been eager. I'll be putting a post out later. I'm going to get them all unpacked. Yeah, definitely, I think we both want to have a good play with that. We were so busy yesterday that when they arrived we had to go out to a meet, and it was horrible. We thought, oh, just, let's have a play. We couldn't even, we couldn't even have a look at what we received. So we'll be back in there today to have a look. So we have got two of them. We've got one going up north and we've got one here. But again, incredibly, incredibly accurate alignment.
Speaker 2:And it's not just about with precision maintenance for laser alignment, excuse me, it's not just about getting additional reliability. We get that. You know, when we laser align something it's going to make something last longer. But there's some energy cost savings to be had massively with laser. Yeah, I agree 100%.
Speaker 1:Huge, huge savings, massively. And there was a study that Acoem even said that if you align, if you had all of your equipment aligned, the energy saving was quite high. I don't remember what it was, it was quite high. I can't remember what it was.
Speaker 2:It was enough to turn your head and go.
Speaker 1:It was, yeah, and it's something as well that you disregard. You don't think it has a big difference, but it's a bit like the Air League situation, where loads of little Air Leagues add up to a huge amount and the idea is sustainability needs to be focused on the fact that anything that we can do to improve it, we need to do.
Speaker 2:And laser alignment as well, doesn't isn't too taxing, it's not difficult, it's not too complicated. You need to have the right technical knowledge about how to do it, depending on the machine, but it's not like a, a task that, if you wanted to get done, is going to cause you lots of downtime no, I agree, and that's what we're doing as well.
Speaker 1:When we spoke to alliance about having a look, he's got a lot of couple drives so a lot of the time they do a lot of coupling checks, right, well, now we can do an alignment check as well, just to make sure that it's in alignment. And a lot of people think, well, how would a machine move? You'd be so surprised about machines that we've thought how the hell is that mower that size moved? And they do, they do. We've had it before where we've checked the alignment year on year on very big applications that you just never think would just like. How was that move? And we have evidence that there are times where we've seen and okay, it might be very small tolerances, but still them tolerances. If they move out of tolerance means there's potential damage to the sum from there.
Speaker 2:How long are you going to wait until you next work out that? Oh my goodness, now I'm massively out of time.
Speaker 1:Exactly, but then how long as well has it been running in a state of poor alignment? You don't know until you do the checks on that, and that's the thing as well. What we can do is and what we have been doing with some clients is not getting them to buy 8400. That's obviously the extremely higher end piece of equipment that we would use as service providers. But what we can do is offer some training, because we can't be there all the time. And if you want to use this as a planned maintenance function and add it to your PM structure in terms of what you're doing well, then we can give you some training or we can sell you some kit as well.
Speaker 2:It works really well with our customers that we do do condition monitoring with that are using Nest Vision as well, because they can upload their alignment data straight into our in the dashboard.
Speaker 1:And that's another beautiful thing about Nest Vision as well, and I think what we probably will do is a separate podcast on that. Talk about how we're starting to now integrate people into more of a cloud based kind of world, how that, how is it valuable and why? Why is it important to have information in a single place? Because, ultimately, what we do is great, but if it's scattered information, how do we pull it into somewhere? And Nest Vision is really. It's incredible actually how they've managed to be able to keep all of these things in one place for the customer. That's another separate podcast which I'm quite excited to be able to talk about. But getting back kind of to the solve area, laser alignment incredibly important, and that's something that we do for a lot of our customers and it could just be, you know, from a bearing change of what we're doing. If it's a couple pieces of machinery, we can do it.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's just a check. We've done lots of checks, we've done engine checks on boats but they don't warrant a full alignment. But they just want on a report to say can you verify that our alignment?
Speaker 1:is within tolerance Exactly, and I think that's as well. If you do have and looking at more of a reliability kind of function, if you do have a lot of couple drives and you're unaware and you haven't had anything checked in a while, it might be worth looking into just maybe getting some initial checks first, because a lot of people say, well, we've got vibration analysis That'll pick it up. Not always we've got vibration analysis that will pick it up, not always. Yeah, and I'm telling you now it's a myth that if you have a light misalignment issues, right, there's a lot of factors that can can get in the way of the fact that, coming in, even into your vibration, yeah, dampening, dampening the structure, exactly that type of coupling is extremely important, important and it's a type of tie on the type of clutching.
Speaker 2:We hear quite a lot in some engineers who will say well, you know, it's a tyre coupling, it can allow for misalignment. And the thing is, is the coupling itself does have? A tyre coupling in particular will have a high level of tolerance for the permissible misalignment of the coupling, not of the seals, a mechanical seal, bearings, everything else.
Speaker 1:And all of these things and that's another thing as well it's another myth to say, oh, we don't need to align it, we've got a tyre coupling on it. Complete BS, guys. Precision alignment by maintain Mate. I will stand by that every day as a reliability advocate and evangelist. But that's what we're trying to do and this is why we're here, because, ultimately, what we're trying to do is spread awareness and information Because, let's be honest, you might not know that it will have a difference, because you look at a tyre company and they look very flexible, don't they?
Speaker 1:And you get the assumption that it might be OK. But this is where precision maintenance comes in and this is where the solve part of maintain comes in, and alignment is going to be a real big driver for us. So, whether you're in the north, whether you're in in the south, and we travel out as well, we've got eight engineers now in total, including us two. We have coverage in the uk and this is something that we're taking very seriously now. So, alignment strategy if you need help with it, get in touch guys. Training or anything, training, or even if say you want to have the kit, we distribute the equipment right. We authorise distributors for this equipment. We can give the training and sell you some equipment and make sure when we leave you're capable of using it and adding value. That's the most important thing. And I'll be honest, the AQUEM alignment gear best of best of you.
Speaker 2:And the most important, with that as well, I want to drum home is the consistent support thereafter, because you are always going to be in a situation where you can teach as much as you want. We can teach you as much as you want in a classroom environment. This is how you do a laser alignment or out on plant and you're still going to be in a situation one day where you need help. Where you need help, we've been there, just call us.
Speaker 1:We've been there, we've been there ourselves and we can advise over the phone. Or yeah, and we've been in a field where we're scratching our heads and we've learned the hard way, and then when you get the realization, oh okay, that's, that's throwing it off and that experience you can't. You can't teach, you've got to be in the field for it. But if we do sell you any equipment, we will be there to support you. That's just our nature as the reliability gang. If you indoctrinate into the reliability gang like we're here to help and do you know what, even if you need some advice or help, throw it our way anyway. That's what we're about. Yeah, exactly, it's not all about that.
Speaker 1:So alignment is a huge one, and another one, you know, for one of our customers. Actually, we've got an engineer there nearly half of his time doing a range of different things. So plan maintenance is something as well that we're starting to pick up, because what we can do on the reliability function is actually are your plan maintenance functions actually valuable to your organization? And we'll get onto that a little bit later on, probably in another separate podcast on PM optimization, but we're looking at more of the solve part. And once we've kind of done that, the idea is well, why don't we use our technology with the PMs, a bit like we're doing with Lance using ADX, using alignment, using some really cool tools to make the PMs as highly as effective as possible?
Speaker 2:And looking at the Famicas that we do as part of Kind of Improve and the reliability stuff to look at that, you know there are going to be some failure modes that we identify that maybe are quite hard to detect. Yeah, definitely that maybe need to have, you know, the cover taken off and had a good look inside it. And that's where Lewis he's working with one of our customers doing a lot of planned maintenance support because they've recognised that they do have tricky-to-access assets. They do have machines that are start stop tricky-to-collect data on very small windows. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's doing a lot of their PM checks which involve mechanical seal inspections. You might not necessarily detect a fault with a mechanical seal through vibration analysis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and the good thing as well what he's there, because he's on site for that period of time. He integrates with the maintenance functions. So if there is something that he can solve, he can put it in CMS. But not only that, he can solve it so he can liaise with the plant operators, get it locked off search for a maintenance window as well and actually go and solve the problem on site.
Speaker 1:So, rather than just us being, oh, you've got a problem here that needs inspection, this whatever we want to say, well, no, we've identified it and now we've solved it.
Speaker 2:He's done really well over this particular customer's two sites we call one main site and one east site. Over at east site they've got a lot of extraction fans and so what he's been able to do is, using the vibration data that we collect every month, identify that there's an imbalance. He can then which we'll touch on in a minute he's able to then balance the fan, but while he's balancing the fan we're taking guards off. We're doing stuff Doing a proper inspection, checking the belts, getting the belt tension but because he's there and supportive of able to do all those, it's all pulling together. And fan balancing is another huge, important task of ensuring the best reliability of the machine, because we know when a fan is out of balance, bearings aren't particularly happy no, they aren't.
Speaker 1:And as well, that's going to obviously cause that machine or whatever is around it, whether it's fan bearings or motor, to fail a lot more quicker Vibrate, fatigue, cracks, all sorts of different problems, not just the motor or the fan bearings you're looking at, it's all sorts of different issues that can come off that. So that's what we're trying to mitigate and we're trying to be able to solve as well. So again, it's a little bit of a different model to the general consensus. Again, it's a little bit of a different model to the general consensus, but it works highly effectively when you can have someone with good condition, monitoring, experience and understanding how to use the equipment, good engineering knowledge, but not only that integrated within the site process. So what it is a case of is not just giving loads of problems. Again, he's actually liaising and planning and scheduling this work in. Do you know what I mean? Which?
Speaker 2:again, takes time, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:Instead of having us come in and doing it and for a lot of customers that works comes in, do a fan balance, come out or do a laser alignment, or we'd go in once a month to do certain PMs, what we do with this particular customer it works very well is what Lewis is.
Speaker 2:Is he really is a focus as a preventative, proactive and predictive maintenance and, yeah, I love precision, and precision it lets the maintenance team on site do. Is there is a tier, top tier coma site so their engineers really focus on the stuff that we can't really get involved with, the high level stuff that needs a lot of site level knowledge. Their team can focus on that. They can focus on the things that do react and they have to react to because they're still on their reliability journey. They're not quite there fully yet. But what Lewis can focus on is making sure that you know the PMs are being completed, that are not going to try to avoid catching them out. The precision maintenance is being done, trying to keep up with those things that oh, I've identified that the fan's loose or the fan cow's loose Seems a really minor thing.
Speaker 1:But it's important because you know, if that gets loose and it falls off and then there's a health and safety risk and and that's the thing as well about obviously mitigating you know, looking at what the health and safety side, especially at tier two coma site that if you can get the reliability right, the risk element of health and safety or explosive, it reduces massively. So this is where, as well, you know, it is obviously for compliant reasons as well to be compliant, but it is to be helped, you know, to try to be better with health and safety, which also has a byproduct from being more reliable and obviously putting these things in place. Hence why this is a very successful strategy at this particular customer. Do you know what I mean? So you know, in terms of that solve part and the plan maintenance part, we can help out massively as well. So what we covered?
Speaker 2:just want to make sure we've covered everything We've done engineering, a bit on engineering services. We talked about the story about the compressor, talked about plan maintenance and the stuff we're doing and Lewis is doing really well and we do for another other customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we talked about alignment, didn't we? And fan balancing Fan.
Speaker 2:Balancing, yeah, repair center, or do you want to go in a bit more detail? Yeah, well, the capabilities that we can actually, yeah, I think we'll just finish on the on the repair center.
Speaker 1:So great example, harry went to site with me. Actually we went together on this job because I wanted to get my hands there, you know, kind of can't stay away, yeah, can't stay away from it, yeah. So we went to side and it was really basically, um, what? What we identified was a bearing defect. Well, a dry bearing on a sealed bear, on a sealed motor. Uh, uh, on a on an actual motor and the bearing block completely over lubricated, right. So we've identified what's the machine. The machine was, uh, as a gas booster, okay, gas booster pump. So what the scope was was just a bearing block replacement, replaced the motor. Good to go, right, sounds easy, sounds easy as art. But we know, we know that. You know, the thing for me was like okay, in premise, quite an easy job take the motor off, obviously, replace the coupling.
Speaker 1:But as we started to do the job, we just started to find more problems. So initially, when we took off the cover for the coupling right, the customer did not have the right coupling right. So we found the coupling completely damaged, right already, to be fair, in terms of vibration. That we didn't really see. See that, because it was one of them, um, kind of syndrical couplings, that kind of clip in, yeah. So it was very rusty and it hadn't been lubricated either. So you have to lubricate this particular coupling as well.
Speaker 1:So that was a problem, an issue. So we managed to get one built and machined extremely quickly within a day. They had a three-day shutdown. So that was the first issue a problem, and the second issue was obviously to replace a bearing block. It was a obviously a solid unit. So you can't it's not a plumber block bearing assembly you can't take the bearings off one side. We had to take the impeller off to get the assembly off, to reinsert it again, and I'm telling you, this fan impeller was not coming off. We tried everything and obviously the site conditions didn't allow for us to be able to use any heat, so we had to get it back in the repair centre and guess how much right tonnage pressure it took to get this shaft off the hub.
Speaker 1:This was after we did try heat in the repair center, so we actually yeah, so we're in the repair center now, obviously used, uh, some heat to try to get off hydraulic pullers and hydraulic pullers and nine times out of ten, mate, usually the hydraulic pullers will be able to get it's not a massive fan, by the way. You know you're talking. The hub was, was you know, shaft size, 100 mil? Yeah, not even that. I'm not sure Harry would have measured everything. But again, it took 45 tonnes of pressure.
Speaker 2:We had to cut the monoblock in half to pull the fan and shaft through to then put it in our 100 tonne press and we got it out and obviously you should have seen the damage.
Speaker 1:I might even put some photos if I can, if I can read it because of the environment.
Speaker 2:This gas booster was in. It basically welded itself to the shaft and it was complete.
Speaker 1:The hub was completely damaged so had to be remachined. So we got our trusty partners on that and they turned it around extremely quickly, straight in, straight um keyways completely obviously beamed in as well with the coupling because the coupling was machine fit to size. Got them installed. Got that completely realigned at the workshop as well because we had the whole unit. So we was able to do that.
Speaker 2:We give it the new mower at the exit as well.
Speaker 1:We checked the mower as well. Give that element there as well. When, as well, give that element there as well. When we got it back to site, did a quick alignment check as well, just to make sure everything was good, all good to go. And it all got widened by the electricians. And great Jobs are good. Jobs are good.
Speaker 2:It sounded easy, but it's so stressful it's like I've got to get this back what's going on here, but this is again.
Speaker 1:it's still a bit of a. Obviously they needed it, but we managed to make it reliable.
Speaker 2:We did, but also, off the back of that, we were able to issue a number of recommendations to the customer to ensure that it wasn't going to happen. And not just that, there's also design recommendations in that as well, that we're looking to work with that customer on Not something we really could have implemented there and then, but fundamentally, it's not the greatest situation to be in to have to cut the monoblock in half, to pull the shaft down, yeah, and what we were able to do is using our engineering knowledge mine, harry's, yourself come together with a design modification on the fan that we were able to then submit, to see if we can potentially put something in place to prevent that happening exactly.
Speaker 1:And now, obviously what we've done with this particular customer is, well, the lubrication schedules, because we was only doing once every six-month checks before they're shut down. So now he's agreed that for the critical assets we're starting to do more condition monitoring, so monthly surveys now. But what we've said to him is look, in terms of the greasing schedules, I think what's been happening is they've been doubly greased to OEM standards, so I think there's two people doing it, which has caused the issue to happen. So we've said look, we'll look after that now. So now there's no problem with that getting overgreased, because I tell you the amount of lubricant lube it was, the whole block was full of grease. So again, this is a problem that has been induced. Again, not always, even when you're looking at lubrication schedule, not always the best practice.
Speaker 2:When you look at, I've just come and just finished my ultrasound course. Shout out to the guy at UE Fantastic. But we talked about everyone knows. You know lubrication is one of the biggest causes of failure. That is about but one of the things craig said and you, you, you know it but you just don't think about it when you think of you know lubrication big cause of failure and design, they're usually the top two. What do they both have in common? Humans?
Speaker 1:human, human error. But, guys, um, that is our kind of 30 minute up for the, for the, for this, for this podcast. But if you are interested in any of the solve services that maintain and what we can do, the idea is there's lots of different things. So, guys, usually it's just a chat and a discussion to see what your process is and if there's anything that we can implement in there, because you might have a really robust, you know, maintenance department anyway, but there's always somewhere where we can help. You know, lance is a great example, they've got a great team, but what we're doing is looking at more reliability elements.
Speaker 2:But you know, helping out their plan maintenance anywhere from us coming to do it to us, supporting you so you can do it exactly anywhere in between improving reliability together, improving reliability together.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys.
