How to Perform Proper Maintenance and Repairs

When it comes to maintenance, it is vital to not only do things right but to also do the right things. You must not only eliminate wrong ways of doing the right things, you must also stop doing the wrong things. Let’s look at some examples:

• Tightening fasteners. Yes, loose electrical connections are bad. They lead to failures, which may be catastrophic to the equipment or even the facility. But simply tightening them as part of a PM will actually make them loose. The reason has to do with the modus of elasticity of the bolts. You can stretch a bolt to its maximum clamping power only once. Every attempt after that, you essentially weaken a weakened spring.
• Ignoring fasteners. If retightening fasteners makes them looser, is it better to simply not touch them? No. The most efficient way to prevent failures from loose electrical connections starts with performing thermographic inspections to identify suspect connections. Then you measure the resistance across each of those to identify the ones needing repair. A repair of any bolted connection (electrical or not)  involves several steps, including cleaning of the mating surfaces and replacement of the bolt and locking device (e.g., lockwasher). Never re-use bolts and never re-use lockwashers.
• Ignoring manufacturer’s maintenance recommendations. Doing this can not only void your warranty issues, it can also leave important steps out of the PMs for the equipment. In the case of the breakers, transformers, switches, etc. that comprise the electrical infrastructure supporting the equipment, follow both the relevant industry standards and the manufacturer’s recommendations.
• Blindly following manufacturer’s maintenance recommendations. In some cases, the recommendations may be technically incorrect. If you find such a problem, work it out with the manufacturer. A more common situation is your application doesn’t fit the model the manufacturer had in mind when writing the maintenance recommendations. So use those recommendations as a starting point rather than some kind of upper limit to what you will do. For example, you have a pulping operation, and pulp accumulates on a specific motor. The manufacturer’s maintenance instructions say nothing about removing it, so should you leave the pulp there as a major contributor to motor overheating or should you add clean-up to your PM?
• Not understanding the craft involved. Among other attributes, a competent maintenance tech has a high “tool IQ.” This person also takes pride in his work and pays attention to small details even if nobody else will see them. A maintenance manager in Ohio always checked the shoes of interviewees. What he was looking for is whether the applicant shined merely the tops or took the time to also polish the lower part of the shoe. He felt that someone who didn’t take a minute to run polish around that less visible part of the shoe prior to a meeting as important as a job interview would also take shortcuts in the plant.
• Seeing safety as an add on to the work. If work isn’t methodical, you will need to add safety steps on top of it. This will give the appearance that the safety steps are responsible for the extra time the work takes. But the real fault lies with performing work in an unmethodical manner. By making the work follow an established procedure, you actually save time even when you add in the safety steps. Let’s say you didn’t care about safety at all but were very keen on job efficiency. In that case, you would still have the responsible person of a crew conduct a job briefing so that everyone in the crew knows what the job is about and what to expect.
• Keeping costs down. One way to keep costs down is to avoid updating tools and test equipment. Here is something you can easily “do right” but is it the right thing to do? Pick any older power tool or any older DMM that you have on hand and compare it to a current version. You’ll be authorizing those expenditures shortly thereafter. Things get really interesting when you compare your maintenance failures or epic troubleshooting ordeals to the abilities you would gain by purchasing the portable power analyzer or other test equipment you “saved money” by not buying.