Machinery Lubrication June 2012

Oil additives offer a wide range of benefits, but in some circumstances they can actually be harmful to the machines in which they are added. For example, let’s look at worm gearboxes. These...

In 1948, Visy Paper was started by the Pratt family in Melbourne, Australia, as a manufacturer of corrugated cardboard boxes. Today, Visy has become one of the world’s leading packaging, paper and...

Approximately 95 percent of the current lubricant market share is comprised of conventional (mineral-based) oils. Most people know these mineral oils are derived from a crude stock, but how...

In the field of tribology, the word “particles” means different things to different people. The following case studies illustrate how differently the mechanical engineer, tribologist, sampler,...

Use caution with grease lines that run out of the machine frame and are intended to offer easy lubrication access points. Since these line extensions often carry more than a few shots of grease,...

These days, best-practice contamination control is more like an accepted pre-condition for reliability. Given contemporary advances in technology for excluding and removing contaminants, it could be said that a failure to control contamination is a failure of machine design rather than a failure of maintenance.

With all the different gearbox failure modes, it’s important to be aware of the various tests that can be used to develop and confirm a hypothesis for the probable cause of failure. Lubricant...

The ISO code is a fantastic tool for setting target alarms and establishing a goal to achieve and maintain as it relates to system cleanliness. It is also the perfect value to use for key performance indicator (KPI) tracking, charting and posting. However, in the lubrication and analysis world, too much value is placed on the ISO cleanliness code.

Lubrication professionals often become very familiar with the base oil viscosity of their lubricants. After all, viscosity is the most important property of a base oil. Baselines for incoming oils...