Overheard a guy at the supply shop in Mobile say his cutterhead locked up from not checking the grease ports for 3 months

He said he was running a 12-inch Ellicott and the bearings seized, costing him $4,000 in repairs and a week of downtime, so has anyone else had a close call with a lube schedule slip-up?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair_chen8117d ago

dude that sucks, i feel for the guy. i had a similar oops on my 8-inch cutterhead last year, skipped a month of greasing because i was swamped and figured "eh, what's one more week". got a real nice grinding noise on the third pass that day, caught it just in time before full seizure but still had to tear it all down and replace some bearings. cost me about 1500 and two afternoons of wrenching, learned my lesson the hard way for sure.

mark_chen6217d ago

Was it really that bad or were you just looking for an excuse to tinker?

paige16617d ago

Saw a youtube vid last week from some old timer who runs a planer mill up in Maine, he was saying the same thing basically - keep up on grease or pay the piper. He had a story about a customer's jointer that locked up solid because they were three months overdue on the lube schedule for the cutterhead bearings. Said it cost them a whole new head assembly because the race got so chewed up from metal on metal. The grinding noise is always the first clue, like Blair said, but by then you're already into repair territory instead of just maintenance. Kinda makes you wonder how many machines get scrapped early just from skipping the simple stuff.