The maintenance on a machine tool has similar characteristics to the vehicles that transport many of us to & from work every day. Both are tools that occasionally need some tender loving care. The scale for measuring your vehicle oil changes is usually time or miles. While the number of miles between changes may be different between manufacturers spec’s and your mechanics opinion, we can all agree the oil needs to be changed at some point with reasonable consistency. If you do not change the oil in your vehicle, the oil will eventually breakdown and sludge will build up in the oil pan. During this process your vehicles pumps will be less efficient, parts will wear faster, and areas of the engine will be less lubricated. There will not be a noticeable consequence immediately but there will be a consequence at some point.
Maintenance on machine tools are tracked by machine hours instead of miles. Other characteristics that may affect how often you clean your sump are time, environment, type of metal or job related. Sump cleaning, like an oil change, does not give you any immediate result. Our customers tell us the highest cost to poor sump maintenance is unanticipated downtime, premature tool loss, reworking or throwing out one or more products that failed to meet their customers specifications. Just like your vehicle, maintaining a sump is insurance to prevent unscheduled downtime. Scheduled downtime costs less than unscheduled downtime, because you know the tasks that need to preform and how long the they will take.
Many companies consider multiple factors when determining the time between sump cleanings:
- Number of hours on the machine
- Type of environment around the machine
- Type of material being machined
- Change in type of material being machined
- Type of sludge created
- Depth of sludge in the sump
- How often the filters need to be changed in the machine tool
- Amount of rework coming from a machine
- Excessive tramp oil in coolant
If you would like to talk to us about regarding machine tool sump cleaning, please call us at 1-800-356-9042, or cecor@cecor.net..