 | Mike Davied is the owner & operator of Mikes Repair & Fabrication LLC located in Frontenac, KS. He has been repairing equipment for 40 years and has ran his own business for 20 years. For more information or to contact Mike please call 620-235-0061. |
Equipment, Maintenance & Repair
2011-11-21 12:06:50
Improving maintenance procedures
A: Here’s how I go about my routine (and not so routine) checks for most machines and heavy use vehicles.
Every day check engine fluid levels, usually at the start of your day. Visually inspect for low tires, or other obvious defects such as oil dripping on the ground or roadway, or such things as a track roller leaking oil, a keeper missing from a hydraulic cylinder, or a hose with rub spot on it. This would be a good time to take your grease gun with you and perform daily greasing if needed. By now we have an idea (or should have) what the service or operators manual says about oil change intervals and other periodic services that are unique to each machine so be sure to check the odometer or hour meter for these items.
Be sure to keep records of each service for future reference.
What FUTURE reference do you mean? For instance, oil consumption between oil changes. Then we start a schedule of oil samplings where we send regular samples of oil from each component to a laboratory for analysis of, wear metals, soot level, water in oil and a variety of other tests, when all put together with your detailed records of each and every service we can start to predict upcoming breakdowns and that will save you MUCH money. More next month…
