Consequences of irregular maintenance: How to avoid machine breakdown?

Otherwise you will soon face a sudden collapse of the electric injection unit’s guiderails that leads to inevitable breakdown.

Let’s examine the simple act of properly greasing the guiderails of an electric injection unit: The correct greasing method is fully described in our service handbook. However, there is a step that is too often left out by our customers’ maintenance teams. Greasing and properly aligning your machine’s guiderails should absolutely be a top priority, otherwise irreversible damage will be caused, which will not be recognized by the machine’s electronics until it is too late. The resulting collapse of the guiderail system will destroy the castings of the injection unit, the ball screws, and even the plasticising unit itself.

The simple act of moving the injection unit 2-3 times across the full mechanical stroke of the guiderails during greasing allows the ball bearings to cycle and pick up the fresh lubrication. In many cases, the injection stroke is too short to allow good circulation of the ball bearings alone. If this step is not done, the lubrication never reaches the ball bearings in use, and the guiderails quickly collapse. Thus, you are suddenly facing unexpected downtime.

They were practically invisible behind the safety guarding and the extreme friction shifted the injection unit causing unplanned downtime.

The injection guiderails are hidden behind the protective guarding of the injection unit. Even after removing the protective covering, the damage might not be obvious to the untrained eye. The machine must be maneuvered into a position that exposes the travelled path of the ball bearings. Only then are you able to properly inspect these critical components. Depending on the severity of the damage, the possibility increases that the injection unit has become misaligned due to the extreme forces caused by this friction. Now, a simple exchange of the guiderails becomes insufficient and cannot prevent a breakdown. The guiderail system is designed to be the weak link in the forces to protect the plasticising unit and ball screws from breakage in case of misalignment or catastrophic failure. Therefore, a complete injection unit alignment becomes necessary.

Such unpleasant surprises can only be avoided with scheduled annual inspections.

The correct greasing process in conjunction with the scheduled annual preventive maintenance of these critical components would have been the solution to prevent this breakdown. But let’s be honest, scheduling your inspections with the right maintenance experts can be a challenge, if you plan to do it internally. Your maintenance technicians work at their full capacity and servicing what “appears to be” a perfectly working machine is sometimes not at the top of their to-do list.

However, it is better to plan for the long run. Otherwise, this sad story of damaged guiderails can also happen to you. The unexpected cost this unfortunate customer had to pay for his poor maintenance plan was over €30,000 in repairs. Not counting the one-week-long of downtime he had to endure.

ENGEL’s experienced service team will be happy to take the weight off your shoulders!

An annual professional machine inspection would have saved this customer his nerves as well as prevented the unplanned downtime. With the most basic ENGEL care package – care inspection – he would have received the information that the greasing of the guiderail system is insufficient, as our service specialists are trained to examine these critical components. Moreover, ENGEL offers a very inexpensive retrofit that would allow him to update the grease delivery system to 4pt greasing. This would allow his team to keep breakdowns to a minimum and maintain the equipment more effectively.

ENGEL uses a software developed by our technical engineering department in collaboration with our technical field service team. This makes it possible to adapt inspection points to your machine’s specific configuration. Our care algorithm is constantly evolving to meet the needs of our customers’ machines. When ENGEL’s field service team takes care of breakdowns in the field, they discuss the possibilities in detail with our engineers. This cooperation has allowed ENGEL to build a massive database of maintained solutions to enable your equipment to achieve maximum availability.