Story by Chris Rowan, Product Support Training Manager,
Cat dealer Thompson Machinery
Your forestry equipment is what you rely on every day to produce. Yet forestry is one of the toughest applications for a machine. Extreme temperatures, long running hours, rough underfoot conditions and dust combine to increase the likelihood of a breakdown, which costs time and money.
I recently interviewed one of our top mechanics to learn what he thought customers could do to improve machine uptime. After talking with him for an hour I realized that it boiled down to preventive maintenance.
Good maintenance habits will prolong machine life, reduce the frequency and severity of repairs and maximize uptime. Poor maintenance habits can lead to catastrophic failures, resulting in downtime, lost revenue and major repair bills.
Here are some key tips to make sure your machine stays productive:
Keep radiator and coolers clean. During the summer months in the South, logging jobs get dusty. Add the slight amount of dew that forms on machines in the early mornings and you have a recipe for a plugged radiator or coolers. Plug a radiator with dust, and engine, hydraulic and transmission temperatures will peg out in no time. Modern electronically controlled machines will sense coolant and oil temperatures and derate the engine to reduce the chance for catastrophic failure. However, derating reduces production. It’s a good idea to clean out your radiator and coolers with air pressure, not water. Dust can cake up on a wet cooler that has been sprayed with a water hose.
Don’t prefill fuel filters. Many people are used to prefilling a new fuel filter with diesel fuel to reduce the amount of time it takes to prime the fuel system. Bad idea. Modern diesel engines have extremely tight tolerances to get the fuel economy and emissions required today. In prefilling fuel filters you are much more likely to see premature wear and failure in your injectors and other fuel system components than if you are careful to keep contaminants out of the system.
Pay attention to warning lights. Manufacturers have put more electronics on machines to help operators and owners avoid problems, but warning lights and buzzers can’t help if you don’t pay attention to them. Many faults have a progressive warning system, which may include a light, then a light and an alarm sound, and finally derating the engine or even machine shutdown. However, manufacturers have to put operator overrides into the system in case the failure happens while the machine is in a dangerous position. If you choose to override the warning you could be risking a catastrophic failure. One of our customers had an engine warning light occur just before his operator had completed his work for the day. He decided to keep going and finish the job. It turned out a bottom radiator hose had failed and drained the radiator. Those few minutes of extra production cost this customer a complete new engine.
Perform preventive maintenance at recommended intervals. Waiting for the machine to tell you that your fuel filter is restricted before you change it is a bad idea. So is extending maintenance intervals without the validation provided by regular fluid sampling reports. It won’t show up right away, but running dirty filters and overused oil will cause cumulative damage that will increase the frequency and severity of repairs.
Hydraulic cycle times can slow as much as 10% before the operator will notice the difference because it happens gradually. That means an hour of lost production a day for a machine that operates 10 hours a day. At current fuel prices, you could wind up spending $500 to $1000 a week in wasted fuel due to slowed cycle times—all as a result of running dirty oil due to extended change intervals.
Use good-quality filters. Sometimes you can spend dollars to save pennies. A cheap filter that fails and allows dirty air, oil or fuel to contaminate expensive components can be one of these situations. Using good quality filters might cost a bit more, but they save much more in repairs later on. Again, this is something that won’t show up right away, but it will cause wear over time.