Howley Engineering offers a range of maintenance contracts to suit customers requirements. Some regular maintenance is essential to extract maximum life from a unit, whereas other forms of maintenance are an insurance against unplanned disruption of your production.
Condition monitoring
The worry of all businesses is the catastrophic failure of a gearbox on a critical piece of production equipment. This causes massive disruption to schedules, even is a spare is available on-site. This is where regular condition monitoring provides an important insurance against this. By maintaining a regular record of key performance indicators, like temperatures and vibration frequency and magnitude, early warning of a potential failure can be flagged up.
Regular preventive maintenance
Appropriate preventive maintenance is critical to the long term reliability of a gearbox, and generally is planned to fit in with current production schedules. This entails regular lubricant changes, replacement of seals and bearings at manufacturer-specified intervals and detailed checking of the integrity of the unit and associated equipment.
Predictive maintenance
Whereas regular maintenance is dictated generally by production cycles, predictive maintenance looks at the manufacturers data on the expected lifetime of individual components in a gearbox. Maintenance schedules are driven by these, and are generally applied to machinery which has a variable duty cycle such as lifting gear.
Planned maintenance
The method of operation of many plants revolve around regular cycles of production, and to maximise the efficiency of production, gearbox maintenance is scheduled to take place during plant shut-down periods.
Emergency breakdown cover
It is inevitable that some gearbox problems occur out of the blue, and in these cases it is important to have reliable breakdown cover so that a plant can be got up and running as soon as possible.