You can pay me now or you can pay me later!

[Richard King]

I was just down in Oklahoma working for a company with several older machines. They asked me to do some PM (preventative maintenance) on their machines. I started on a 1941 year 36" Bullard vertical turret lathe. They are a job shop and rebuild oil refinery and power plant valves.

They weld the worn areas, bore and face and restore these valves to new tolerances. They have 5 Bullards and 1 King VTL's. They are swamped and they just hired a maintenance man. What we did was to first clean the machine (s), wiped of the years of grease, dirt and chips. I used industrial soap like Simple Green and on the stubborn crud I used paint thinner, a putty knife and Scotch-Brite.

After cleaning the ways I hand and power scraped the exposed flat ways that had lost all the old pockets and 1/2 mooned oil flaked them They said the machines were still cutting straight but they could not see the scraping marks any-more. This is a typical scenario I see in many machine tools everywhere.

I also took off the way wipers and cleaned them and reinstalled them. Then I took a .001" feeler gage and tried to slide it under them, several were worn and it feel in. I removed them, cut some o-rings in 1/2 and slid them in behind (shimmed out) the old wiper and it's holder and that worked to press it against the ways. I then checked to be sure all the grease fittings worked and took grease, stoned off any burrs on the ways and table top, etc.

While I did this the new maintenance man cleaned the flat belt (we ordered a new one too), drained and cleaned the transmission oil, adjusted the feed and rapid clutches and tightened the gibs. The machine hopefully run another 71 years with these simple steps. Many times this is all a machine needs. There are many reasons a machine wears and many times it's because of poor maintenance or the operator uses a air hose to blow clean the ways and that blows the chip and dirt under the way wipers. Many times when I see a air hose hanging on a machine I look at the owner and say "Turn up the pressure, so you have to call me sooner"

Many times machine are cutting straight but start get stick slip which is a jerking motion when you move the parts. This is caused by to much friction because the oil pockets are gone. A simple cut and flake and some PM will make a machine last longer. A whole lot cheaper then a rebuild. Remember the TV commercial "You can pay me now (simple PM) or PAY ME LATER (complete rebuild).

 

[pdentrem]

Good write up. Keeping equipment running is not hard if people just try a little bit.

I am going to point out the air gun tip to the turning center operator. I do not know if he even realizes what it can do to his big baby.

What I hate is auditors come in and tell us that we send too much money on maintainence, or how to make stuff when all they have ever done is push paper, suck up oxygen, water and space. Oh I forgot the last one - suck up the company's money, ie my profit share!
Pierre

 

[strantor]

I do machine maintenance for a living (self employed). I don't work on machine tools, but rather wire & cable production machines (extruders, winders, capstans, etc.). Before I struck out on my own, I was working in the maintenance dept for a big name oilfield company who makes downhole cables. The mismanagement I saw there was disgusting. The plant manager position had a turnover on average every 1.5 yrs, and every time we got a new manager, he had some grand idea about how the maintenance dept should operate. In the name of Lean six sigma, we scrapped tons, literally - hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spare parts. We had a whole warehouse full of spare parts inventory - at least one of every part for every machine. Boss man says "well some of these parts haven't been used in years! - they're just taking up space ! - get rid of them!" Alright, so we got rid of them, and consolidated our footprint down to a few cubicles and a couple racks of parts, and guess what? Downtime BAM! every other time a machine went down, it stayed down for way longer than should be, waiting on parts jumping through hoops shipping in the middle of the night, red shipping, etc. That manager stayed around even less time than others. New guy comes in and says "why don't you guys keep spare parts on hand for these machines?" SMH.

Upside is, I had the opportunity to salvage lots of cool stuff from the tractor-trailer roll-off spare parts scrap bin.

 

[Richard King]

I have also seen that in a number of plants. One GM up in Ohio where I was teaching a scraping class. Well when I got there I inventoried what scraping tools they had in their crib and I asked if they had any cast iron straight-edges? The crib man said we had several up to 12' long but when they implemented sigma they scrapped all of them. A 12' Brown & Sharpe straight-edge is irreplaceable. Stupid a_s way of doing business. (since then the plant was closed and moved to China) It has hurt our countries in so many ways.

I was also in a gear factory teaching once in Paris, AR and the Maintenance Foreman asked me to talk to the new purchasing agent, because he told them to figure out what oil could be universal so they could just order one type of oil and cut costs..the dumb a_s PA would say "oil is oil" and no need to have way-oil, hydraulic oil, spindle oil, etc.

The foreman was beside himself, but and was told to buy 1 or get fired. They have grinders with Babbitt bearing spindles, so he ordered spindle oil and used it in everything. I walked into the PA office with several maintenance manuals for the new CNC machines they had purchased for $Millions of dollars and told him he had voided all of their warrantee's by doing that. He argued with me.

I walked out of his office and right into the plant managers office. The main man was SHOCKED when I told him what the dumb a_s had done and he was immediately fired. When dealing with these educated idiots one has to remind them they can be fired too, when a $ 1/2 million machine is ruined because of their cost saving idea's. Or downtime because the parts have to be made from a print for 10's of thousands of dollars after they tossed the part they paid $100.00 for.

Remember what the commies said about "we can't beat them militarily but we can beat them with their stupidity". They make us feel guilty for what we did to "mother earth". I believe global warming, pollution control, sigma 7 BS is part of their plan. Just think about how North America has declined with all the regulations we have to deal with and the educated idiots that were trained at our liberal universities over the past 25 years.

 

[7HC]

................The mismanagement I saw there was disgusting. The plant manager position had a turnover on average every 1.5 yrs, and every time we got a new manager, he had some grand idea about how the maintenance dept should operate. In the name of Lean six sigma, we scrapped tons, literally - hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spare parts...........

Happens all the time in the bigger companies.
New guy comes in with a shiney new business management degree and has to make his 'mark', usually by changing something that was working perfectly well already, and it nearly always costs the company a fortune.

I've seen it happen so many times it's not funny. :angry:


M

 

[November X-ray]

My Dad used to have a saying when we were kids, he'd say, "boys, if you cannot listen, you can darn sure feel"!

I use that saying many times in today's world, where the "feel" portion would be in the wallet, especially with so many persons that seem to be promoted beyond their true capabilities nowadays but by golly they do have a degree that shows they surely must know what their doing!

Nothing beats experience hands down!

 

[pdentrem]

Local aviation subcontractor went through a Sigma 6, a number of years ago.
They were told to get rid of any shop floor jigs, custom tools etc if they were not listed on the paperwork from the buyer. Well that slowed/stopped production for a while, as the guys had to make new jigs as the jobs came back in over the next few months and years. They were also told not to make more than the required parts as per the contract. Well if you are making 4 vertical stab, and one has a screw hole in the wrong place, well you have a scraped part and now need to wait for a new one to be made up. But wait, the machine making that part is in the middle of maintainence and is down waiting for parts that are not stocked at the plant, not locally nor by the manufacture.
Well here we are twiddling our thumbs waiting and waiting ....

I can the see the money saving from here, CEO made his bonus, I mean savings, for his retirement.
Pierre

 

[strantor]

I have also seen that in a number of plants.

Happens all the time in the bigger companies...I've seen it happen so many times it's not funny.

went through a Sigma 6, a number of years ago.... Well that slowed/stopped production

WTH is being taught in a management degree? I've sat through these six sigma meetings and the stuff these talking heads are spouting out is totally bogus. The guys on the floor, the ones who really know what is going on, just look at eachother and shake their heads. They know better. But these talking heads say that its been done in other plants and productivity shot through the roof and there was not one single negative side effect. Then they implement it; people waste time and money on flushing time, assets, and money, and a few months down the road, they say that the half baked plan is working! working? I would love to see the metric they're using to guage "working."

 

[Kevin45]

Same thing happened to our plant. Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, 5S, Green Belt Training, Black Belt training. The first things to go were a lot of machines, then raw stock, then spare parts in the Maintenance Department. When a machine went down, then JIT kicked in. They would order what they needd and expected to get it JIT (Just in Time) So instead of the machine being down for a couple of hours, it was now down for a couple of days or even longer. Other companies sometimes won't bow down to what you need, especially when history has shown it took the other company up to 6 months to get their money from previous orders. Then when the machine was down, now rescheduling the manufacturing of the parts kicked in and now they had to put the parts on another machine that was already being taxed pretty hard. The company wants machine time to be around 95% capacity at all times. Now you want that machine to run more parts. To do that, more overtime. Instead of 5 hours on Sat. and 5 hours on Sunday, the overtime was increased to 12 hours each day. Yep, all of that is real money savers. And all of that was patterned after Toyota's Operating System. And besides that, the "Hot" job that has to ship by the end of the day.....You still have to get it done, but there is four hours of Six Sigma training today.

 

[samthedog]

The 5S and Six Sigma etc. works. If you don't have people waiting on your delivery and all your suppliers or sub suppliers are ignoring these principles. I mean, how does JIT work if your supplier is also using this principle? And then his supplier? It only takes one break in the chain and you are left hanging while delivering a contract. Today's business world being what it is, the manufacturer or the last step in delivering the product is the one paying late penalties to the client.

I am an "educated" type, but I also have real-world experience in project delivery. If you have already spent the money in investing in materials and equipment, then throwing it all away is not a money saver. How can it be when you have already made the investment?? Preventative maintenance is one of those things that academics like to argue about. Just like competence development and seatbelts, it's hard to argue the specifics of the cost if one does not apply it. We can see examples of what can happen, but this is usually ignored in favour of the short term cost saving this particular manager wants to add to their bonus for their 18 month stay.

Paul.