Whether they manufacture food, medicines or heavy machinery, maintenance incidents are something that all industries have in common, and something they all want to avoid or at least minimise. Whenever a failure happens outside of the scheduled maintenance window, it is not only inconvenient on multiple levels because it disrupts the production, it causes actual financial losses. Sometimes the loss is in damages caused by the failure, and sometimes in the loss of productive time, but both have an easy to calculate financial impact.
To give an example, a major Asian tire manufacturer used to experience 284 maintenance incidents per year, each resulting in average of 2 hours of downtime. It caused 500.000 USD in production losses each year!
And the cause behind the failures was, what most might call – trivial: nuts coming loose close to the tire moulding press.
The nuts kept loosening due to thermal expansion of the material during the machine’s service. Initially, the maintenance team just kept re-torqueing the nuts to correct clamp load but naturally, since they were not secured with anything at all, the incidents just kept repeating.
And the solution was as simple as the cause of the problem was trivial. A few drops of medium strength Threadlocker Loctite 243 on each fastener before torqueing it onto the bolt and there were no more incidents occurring.
568 hours of downtime became 568 hours of extra production, resulting in half a million dollars’ worth of extra output.
If you want to learn more about the role that threadlocking plays in proactive maintenance, keep an eye out for one of our webinars.
