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By Mike Wheat

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Good Maintenance Habits Equals Optimum Performance!

Right now, while you are thinking about it, go down the hall and push the test button on your smoke alarm.  If you aren’t at home, then put a reminder in your portable memory expander, or write yourself a note, or tie a string around your finger to make sure that you test your home smoke alarm.  And while you are doing that, remember that regular routine maintenance of your machine equipment is vital to your production schedule, your social temperament, and your pocketbook.

Here at HE&M Saw, we regularly check out our machinery.  Everything from the office copy machine to the fork trucks in the warehouse to the HE&M Saws in our own saw shop gets routine maintenance on a regular basis.  Here’s what we do for our saws.

Daily:  We clean them off at the end of each shift.  That means the control is wiped clean, all scrap and drops are removed to recycling bins.   All chips are flushed into the chip pan.  We like to think that a clean saw is a happy saw.  The truth is that a band saw is really tough to get clean once its been neglected for a month or so.  The chips congeal in the coolant and create nearly solid blocks of steel that collect moisture, corrode, and cause havoc with switch settings, foul up the smooth operation of sliding parts and goof up everything that is possible to goof up.  Chips get everywhere and an accumulation of chips can cause a disaster in down time and loss

down to work on them because they know they won’t get filthy just trying to located a kinked air line.  So the bottom line is:  getting your saw clean might be a real hassle but keeping it clean is easy.  Just flush it down every day so that the chips and debris can’t accumulate in all the wrong places.

Here’s another tip that could save you Big Bucks:  if you have to schedule “paid” service from one of our expert saw technicians, you ought to make sure that your saw is clean BEFORE the service technician gets there.  Otherwise, he’s liable to clean the machine himself (for about a bazillion dollars an hour) before he even gets down to fixing whatever is wrong with the machine.  It is very likely you will discover that whatever is wrong with the saw is simply due to poor housekeeping and you’ll get a service bill that could have been avoided if you’d simply maintained the saw.

You can try this for a test.  Remove one shoe and pour about a cup of steel chips into it.  Put the shoe back on and then wear it for the rest of the day.  If you are still comfortable then call me collect because I can make you a really good deal on a time-share condo in Brass Witch, North Dakota.  If your foot is bleeding, cramped, and you are limping then you’ll know what your HE&M Saw feels like when it’s packed with chips.  Really.  Clean is good.  Well, we aren’t going to eat lunch on the discharge table but problems caused from poor band saw housekeeping will eat your lunch in the long run.

Another area that should, but often doesn’t, get attention are the blade guides.  The guides hold 
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The guides hold the blade in alignment for proper cutting.  The blade slides between sets of precision ground carbides.  If you’ve ever purchased a set of carbides you may understand that good, routine maintenance is much cheaper than buying a new set of guides. 

Guide maintenance is simple.  Every time you change the blade, or at least once a week, remove the guide caps and clean out all the chips that will accumulate there.  The chips have a tendency to build up and cause all sorts of cutting problems.  Make sure the carbide guides on the caps are able to “float”. 

Guides that are packed with chips can cause the following problems:

Poor blade life due to misaligned guides.
Crooked cuts due to misaligned guides.
Crooked cuts and poor blade life due to plugged coolant passages.
Poor carbide guide life due to all of the above.

During our hot and humid Oklahoma summers, it is sometimes necessary to drain the water traps more than once a day.  Draining the water trap takes about ten seconds.  Squat down, push the valve sideways (or open the butterfly valve slightly) and allow the water to squirt out.  That’s it.  Don’t allow your operator to complain that this is a maintenance job.  It’s not.  This is an operator job.  If your operator doesn’t know how to drain a water trap, then you need to either train him or get a new operator.  If you’ve ever had to have a saw out of production for a day or two while a cylinder is rebuilt, chances are that this job could have been avoided if the water traps were drained regularly.

While you are at it, make sure the oiler is working properly.  That’s the little gizmo on the filter-regulator assembly (often called the filter-oiler) that introduces a tiny oil mist into the pneumatic system of the saw.  The oiler provides lubrication to the cylinder packings and solenoids to keep everything running smoothly.  

Too little oil (or no oil) and the O-rings and seals will wear out, bind up, rollover, or crumble into pieces that choke the life out of your cylinders.  Too much oil and pretty soon the cylinders will be filled with congealed oil sludge that will do the same thing.  The proper mixture is about a drop of oil every couple of cycles.  Check the quantity of oil in the oiler weekly.

Once a month all of the bearing surfaces should get attention.  A couple of drops of oil on the pivot bearings will keep them in fine shape.  Guide rails and ways should be cleaned and lubricated monthly to prevent rusting and galling of metal-to-metal surfaces.  Wheel bearings should be greased monthly.  The grease helps keep coolant out of the bearings.  A couple or five pumps with a hand held grease gun once a month will do wonders for bearing life.  The gearbox doesn’t require a great deal of preventive maintenance.  It’s a good idea to change the oil every two or three years, however.  Be positive that the gearbox lubricant does NOT contain any sulphur.  Sulphur will destroy the bronze gears in nothing flat.  We recommend Mobile product SHC-634, which is a synthetic lubricant.

Our double-column band saws use chains to connect the lift cylinders to the saw arm.  These chains move very slowly during the lift and cut cycle but they carry a substantial load.  The chains should be cleaned and lubricated every six months.  Lubricating a chain doesn’t mean just spraying the chain with WD-40 or commercial chain lube.  It means actually rotating every chain roller to make sure the lubricant is getting where it need to be.  If the chain has a stuck roller, a spray isn’t going to penetrate and that roller will stay stuck.  If any chain rollers are flat spotted because of binding, replace the whole chain.

So here are three things that you need to write down on the foreheads of your saw operator and your maintenance chief.  (Clean - Drain - Lubricate) 

If you have additional questions about this topic, call or e-mail us today.