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The Key Ingredient to Improving Reliability Success in Your Machine Shop

One topic we hear more and more about these days is reliability. Essentially, this refers to initiatives designed to keep manufacturing facilities up and running efficiently and, well, reliably. It consists of several components such as predictive maintenance, planning, scheduling, data collection and analysis, and much more. Today, we’ll review a critical component to the […]

Achieving Cost Savings with Improved Maintenance and Cooperation

The push and pull between production teams and maintenance teams is a familiar story on shop floors across all sectors. Maintenance wants to keep machines running well, maximizing efficiency and lifespan; production wants a steady stream of finished parts going out the door. We all know who gets their way most often. Production, who tend […]

Achieving In-House Spindle Repair

No matter how built-out your in-house repair department is — how well-equipped or how well-staffed — there will be times when you need to outsource certain services, and source replacement parts. That’s a simple fact. Even union facilities, which mandate in-house repairs, need to outsource certain things they can’t do themselves, due to lack of […]

Monitoring Your Rotary Unions to Avoid Spindle Failure

For spindles that utilize through-tool coolant, rotary unions can be a common cause of failure. And yet, they are equally overlooked — few people include rotary unions on their periodic inspection routines. Rotary unions are specialty joints designed to allow connection of a stationary to a rotating piece of equipment. In spindle applications, rotary unions […]

Avoiding Spindle Failure by Understanding Vibration Analysis Thresholds

We know that small interruptions to productive work time are a hassle that nobody wants. That is why we often find that customers will ignore the alarm notifications when vibration testing is performed on their machinery. Frankly, we do understand the impulse. Why pull a machine out of service when everything seems, at face value, […]

The Importance of Drawbar Maintenance

Drawbars are the type of equipment component that are easy to not think about. Until something goes wrong with it, and you’re suddenly looking at considerable repair bills and potential downtime. In spindle applications, the toolholder does exactly that, holds the tool. Ironically, toolholders themselves have to be held. That’s where drawbars come into play. […]

What is a Root Cause Failure Analysis? Why Should You Demand One?

When a spindle of yours fails, do you simply send it out for repair without getting a full understanding of why it failed? If so, sure, you’re minimizing downtime in that exact moment — but without determining the cause of the failure and fixing that as well, you’re likely dooming the spindle to fail again […]

The Importance of Spindle Lubrication and How to Do It

For a piece of equipment that is designed to rotate at thousands of RPMs, it may seem obvious that proper lubrication is a major factor in the health of spindles. In practice, things are a bit different. While everyone knows that improper lubrication maintenance can lead to spindle failure, it can seem like a far-off […]

The True Costs of Neglecting Spindle Maintenance

Unplanned downtime. It’s practically a boogeyman in industrial circles, and rightly so — every minute that your floor isn’t producing, it’s costing you money. The cost of unplanned downtime is bad enough, but it doesn’t stop there. If production grinds to a halt, the cost of your now unproductive staff adds up too. This doesn’t […]

Dos and Don’ts of Spindle Storage

We have mentioned spindle storage in recent blogs and got a few questions about it, so we decided it was time to address the topic in a blog. Whenever a manufacturer runs a machine with spindles, they do — or definitely should — have a backup spindle on-hand. The backup is there so that the […]