Often, what takes the most time for a repair isn’t the repair itself. That honor goes to setup, as mentioned in our previous issue. But cleanup can also take significant time. Many repair techs, under pressure to put out the next fire, clean up inadequately or not at all.
For example, a tech replaces a mezzanine blower motor and changes the drive belt while he’s in there. He saves time by leaving the old belt on the mezzanine (who is going to see it, anyhow?). This sloppiness leads to other sloppiness, which leads to negative or even tragic consequences.
Rather than sacrifice good working habits, think of ways to reduce cleanup time:
- A well-equipped repair cart helps (and if it has a test lead rack you eliminate “test lead rollup” time).
- Where practical, replace bolt-on covers with flip-lever access schemes.
- If the palletizer requires a special fixture for repairing its drive assembly, find a smart way to store the fixture close to the palletizer rather than in the stockroom.
The main production line was revamped last year. One of the enhancements was putting all of the motors on variable speed drives under PLC control. This has sharply reduced mechanical problems, but all is not roses. The drives unexpectedly stop for no apparent reason; no amount of tweaking the settings has solved this. And the number of motor failures has gone up, instead of having gone down as anticipated.
