Grease Is the Word

March/April 1993 

Sometimes the simplest things in life are the most important.

That statement is certainly true when it comes to maintaining scrap processing equipment. At Denbo Iron & Metal, we've learned that the simplest—and cheapest—way to maintain our equipment is to grease it regularly, even religiously.

Sure, every scrap recycler knows that grease reduces wear on parts, which extends their useful life and reduces downtime due to parts failure. But vigilantly applying grease to equipment is one of those small—but significant—maintenance practices that can be overlooked or discarded in the hubbub of daily operations. This can be a grave mistake, resulting in costly equipment failure, parts replacement, and downtime. It's important, therefore, for recyclers to be reminded that grease can be one of the best and most cost-effective preventive maintenance tools around.

At Denbo Iron & Metal, we're particularly adament about keeping the bearings in our shredder well-lubricated. After all, every hour of downtime on our shredder costs us at least 25 tons of lost production, not to mention the resulting financial loss. And through the hard lessons of experience, we found that most of the failures in our shredder bearings were caused by irregular and insufficient greasing. To rectify this situation, we launched a rigorous program to grease all the shredder bearings every time we stop operation of the machine.

As part of this effort, we bought our eight shredder operators their own grease guns—with their names etched on them—and we require them to have the guns with them, or know where they are, at all times. When we stop the shredder, you should see our operators go to work. They swarm all over the machine like ants on a hill, shooting grease into every fitting.

Has our grease program brought results? You bet. In the past several months, in fact, our shredder hasn't suffered one bearing failure. We've also found that, among its benefits, grease can diminish or eliminate problems related to equipment misinstallations and misalignments—even bad engineering.

What have we had to invest to achieve these results? We currently go through about a case, or 24 tubes, of grease a week. While this may sound like a lot, keep in mind that grease is inexpensive, especially when you consider the unwanted expenses it prevents. One bearing failure during a shred, for example, will cost more than we spend on grease in a year. As for the worker-hours needed to grease our equipment regularly, it's nothing compared with the time that would be expended in the wake of an equipment breakdown.

The moral of the story: Grease doesn't cost, it pays, to paraphrase an old expression.

While this advice may not be a revelation to most scrap recyclers, we feel that using grease as a preventive maintenance tool is a simple but invaluable practice that can't be recommended too often. A little grease—applied at the right time and in the right places—can save you a lot of time, money, and headaches.