Ways To Make Your Assets Last Longer

You work in environments that punish equipment every day. Dust, heat, corrosive chemicals, and long supply lines turn each avoidable failure into a triple hit on production, safety, and budget. I have seen sites fight the same problems year after year because they treat symptoms instead of root causes.

This plan focuses on removing the biggest life killers first. You will prove gains with simple KPIs and scale what works across your site. Expect a clear 90-day path that covers failure mapping, contamination control, surface hardening, precision practices, and targeted monitoring.

Why This Matters to Australian Operations

Maintenance takes 20 to 40 percent of operating costs and drives up to half of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) losses, so removing failure causes is the fastest way to shift those numbers in your favour.

The Size of the Prize

Unplanned downtime costs about 125,000 USD per hour for many industrial operations. If you save just four hours of a monthly outage, that means about 500,000 USD in avoided losses each month. Remote Australian sites face extra risk from heat, dust, and stretched repair times. Build your plan around corrosion, contamination, misalignment, and operating abuse.

Four Dominant Life-Limiters You Can Control

• Corrosion and abrasion on chutes, hoppers, sumps, and structural steel
• Lubrication and contamination issues that silently consume bearing life
• Precision errors like misalignment, soft foot, and improper torque
• Operating abuse from dust ingress, overheating, and aggressive starts

Start With Failure Modes, Not Parts

Grouping failures by mechanism rather than component exposes the dominant causes you can actually remove, so start with your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) data from the last 12 to 24 months.

Build a Top-10 Failure Mode List

Clean your close codes and failure codes. Group them by corrosion, abrasion, lubrication failure, misalignment, overload, and contamination. Add tags for environment and duty cycle to reveal patterns like coastal corrosion or frequent starts. Validate with a quick shop-floor review to capture unrecorded pain points.

Choose the Right Strategy Per Mode

• Run-to-failure for low criticality items with short repair times
• Preventive maintenance for known wear-out mechanisms
• Predictive monitoring for condition-driven degradation
• Redesign or protection when the environment is working against you

Design Out Corrosion and Abrasion

Protective systems deliver extra life with minimal downtime when you select, apply, and measure correctly, and the right coating can add years of service if it fits your chemistry, abrasion levels, temperature, and cure window.

‍

Coating Selection Quick Guide

Epoxies offer strong adhesion and chemical resistance, with cure times from hours to days. Polyurea cures in minutes with high impact resistance, which suits tight shutdown windows. Ceramic filled epoxies excel at erosion resistance for components exposed to slurry. For Australian mine sites facing combined abrasion and corrosion with tight shutdown windows, Liquimix offers Australia ready systems, so scan the mining store to shortlist fast curing polyurea and high build epoxy coatings matched to chemicals, cure time, and temperature limits.

Application Checklist

• Achieve surface profile and verify cleanliness standards
• Measure dew point spread, temperature, and humidity before application
• Apply to specified dry film thickness with stripe coats on edges
• Confirm cure schedule versus return to service timing

Get Lubrication and Contamination Under Control

Poor lubrication and contamination cause roughly half of premature bearing failures, so tightening this area is the cheapest life extension lever you can pull.

Set Cleanliness Targets

Define ISO 4406 cleanliness codes by criticality. Critical gearboxes should hit 16/14/11, general hydraulics 18/16/13, and low criticality assets 19/17/14. Install desiccant breathers on sumps and reservoirs. Add quick-connects for kidney-loop filtration during operation or outages.

Right Lubricant, Amount, and Interval

Select base oil viscosity by operating temperature and speed. Automated lubrication on critical points cuts human error. Avoid grease incompatibility by checking charts and flushing when switching products.

Precision Maintenance Basics

Precision assembly cuts early life failures on rebuilt equipment by focusing on alignment, soft foot, balance, and torque to specification.

Alignment and Torque Standards

Laser align rotating equipment to tolerances appropriate for speed. At 1,500 rpm, target less than 0.05 mm offset and angularity. Eliminate soft foot to less than 0.05 mm shim change during final tightening. Torque critical fasteners to specification using calibrated tools and record values.

Practical Field Kits

Keep a kit with laser alignment tool, torque wrench set, feeler gauges, dial indicator, and shims. Create a one-page checklist covering base flatness, soft foot correction, alignment set, torque verification, and initial vibration reading.

Operate Within Design Limits

Ingress protection, thermal management, and start profiles are three levers operations can control daily without major investment.

Ingress Protection

Specify IP66 or IP67 enclosures for dusty or washdown areas. Route cables to avoid water paths and seal unused knockouts. Use protective covers in extremely dusty zones.

Temperature and Overload Control

Every 10 degrees Celsius rise can roughly double common failure rates. Clean filters, confirm fan direction, and restore airflow. Program VSDs (variable speed drives) with gentle ramp profiles and current limits matched to mechanical systems.

Condition-Based Monitoring That Pays

Select a small set of signals to monitor and act within the P-F interval, the time between first detectable problem and functional failure, on assets where early detection changes outcomes.

Vibration and Complementary Tools

Set alarm zones for RMS (root mean square) velocity by class per ISO 20816. Act when trends change, not just on single spikes. Use ultrasound to set re-grease intervals and thermal imaging to find hotspots quickly.

Your 90-Day Plan

Sequence quick wins first, then structural fixes, and keep scope tight on five critical assets to demonstrate results before scaling.

Weeks 1 to 6

Extract failure data and build your top-10 list. Set cleanliness targets and install desiccant breathers. Correct alignment on top bad actors and pilot a protective system on one high-wear component.

Weeks 7 to 13

Trim PMs that do not prevent specific failures. Train technicians on precision assembly and oil sampling. Hold a formal review comparing baseline versus current KPIs. Select the next asset class to scale based on results.

Conclusion

You will see life on critical assets improve when you remove the main life killers, standardise precision practices, and track a short set of leading indicators such as mean time between failure, oil cleanliness, and corrosion backlog.

FAQs

These answers cover questions teams ask when they start lifting reliability on critical assets.

How Do I Pick Assets for Monitoring?

Choose assets where early detection changes outcomes. Pick five to start: two high-impact rotating assets, one gearbox, one pump, and one fan. Assign alarm thresholds and define actions before starting routes.

What Is a Realistic First-Quarter Improvement?

With contamination control and precision alignment, expect a 10 to 20 percent increase in mean time between failure on targeted assets within 90 days. Document baselines so improvements are credible in reviews.

How Clean Should My Oil Be?

Set ISO 4406 targets by criticality. Keep moisture below 0.2 percent for gear oils. Sample monthly on critical assets and quarterly on others, adjusting frequency based on trends.

How Do I Justify Protective Systems Versus Replacement?

Compare reline costs and downtime to replacement costs and expected life gain. If a coating adds two years of service with one eight-hour shutdown, contrast that with multi-day replacement and production loss.

‍