Thomas E. Daniels, Reliability Foreman, Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.

Maintenance Solutions: Solving Drive Shaft Problems at Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation, West Point, VA.

IDCON came to our facility about 6 years ago and started us on a reliability program that has changed our maintenance department completely. We were very good at being ‘firefighters’ and repairing machinery as it broke down, and we ALWAYS had plenty to do. Our mornings were spent calling the various departments and sending our crews out to repair last nights broken pumps, gear boxes and belts. We took great pride in our ability to accomplish these things in time to go home and rest up for what would surely be a repeat of the previous day. We even got to do it on a lot of weekends!

Then IDCON came to our Mill and told us we need to take some crafts people out of our very efficient ‘firefighting’ crews and put them on special reliability projects. Let them walk around and lubricate and inspect things while they were running. He said we should put windows in our guards and inspect them with strobe lights. He also said we should buy small temperature guns and give them to people to use if they thought there was a heat problem. And the most fun thing he said was “You’re going to have a huge mountain of work to climb up”. Who in the heck is this guy?

Long story short, I’m here today because I was one of the people who committed to the “change”. Today our maintenance department is smaller than it has ever been and the morning meetings are now “this is what we need next week?” instead of ‘this is what we have to do now ‘cause it’s broke!’. We have 8 people who do the Essential Care Monitoring (ECM) & Lubrication on a daily basis, we have 4 vibration analysis people, we have 3 dedicated people who are running hard piping to all 3 paper machines so they can be lubricated on-the-run and 4 people in a pump rebuild shop that would be the envy of any facility. Weekend duty now is almost a formality; we come in, look things over and go home, calls are now rare. Thank you Christor for the development of this program and thank you West Point Mill management for being receptive to new ideas!

In our quest to improve reliability we have accomplished many new and exciting things. As we downsized we lost many crafts people taking with them a tremendous amount of skill and knowledge of our facility. With the implementation of the Essential Care and Monitoring program, we have completely changed the way we do business. Good decision based data is now being stored on the majority of our equipment. The work now by the area foremen of the various areas are driven by the monthly reports generated from the reliability department. Machinery is now being repaired in the early stages before catastrophic damage is done. This allows the machinery to be salvaged and repaired at a considerable cost savings.

I have a device with me today that will save machinery and labor that I would like to share with you. But first let me tell you how it was conceived.

I’m going to be talking about drive shafts, we will define a ‘driveshaft’ as a straight shaft, generally having a slip-joint somewhere in its length and having Universal joints on each end. These are not to be confused with ‘jack shafts’ that use gear couplings or laminated disc couplings. As our reliability program was getting off to a strong start in 1999 we had 4 paper machine driveshaft failures. In 2000 we had 6 failures. Failures in the past were poorly documented and never really caught anyone’s attention because there were too many other things breaking. The reliability group knew that on average, each year, we were losing 5 drive shafts. These took an average of 4 hours to change and the cumulative cost of the parts, labor and lost operating profit was amounting to about $336,000/year. Obviously we saw a huge opportunity!

Smurfit-Stone Corporate engineering services was asked to help find the root cause of our failures. The joints seemed to fail on one bearing of the trunnion with the opposite trunnion bearing on the cross failing shortly thereafter. The other 2 trunnion bearings, most of the time, looked as if they were new. The root cause was determined to be a lack of lubrication. Different drive shaft manufactures were consulted for ways to eliminate these costly failures. One recommendation was to install an on-line, automatic lubrication device. Its price was around $14,000 and it required the disassembly of the gear box, gun drilling the output shaft and installing a rotary joint inside the box. This option required too much down time and was cost prohibitive.

A study of the lubrication history showed lubrication in the mill took a distant back seat to any other maintenance activity the machines required. After talking with the machine maintenance foremen, two agreed to “try” to lube the shafts quarterly, and one said he would “try” every 6 months. On any given outage, the maintenance foreman had 70 to 90 crafts people to supervise and the lubrication duties were generally given to less industrious people with little or no supervision.

As the Essential Care Maintenance (ECM) program was starting to mature and had been made responsible for lubrication through out the mill, it was decided to turn the outage lubrication over to the ECM foreman (me!). Crafts people, in the past, had been split up and told to do different sections of the machine. Accountability for assuring every fitting on the machine was properly lubricated was impossible to verify. A suggestion was made to print maps detailing each point to be greased, have crafts people mark each point off the map and return it to the ECM foreman at the end of the outage with corrections and problems noted. The first time this was done, instead of the normal 7 hours to lubricate the machine, it took 12. But we could say, with reasonable certainty that the lubrication was done thoroughly and completely.

Our investigation into lubrication frequencies for drive shafts discovered that large truck fleets, upon servicing their trucks, required truck drive shafts to have grease exit out all 8 bearing seals when they were greased, or the shaft was replaced. This information is also in most of the literature supplied with new drive shafts. U-joint manufactures also recommend lubrication every 200 to 500 hours of continuous operation. Since shutting the machines down every 8 to 20 days was not attractive, the decision to lubricate them and the rest of the machine on an 8 week schedule was adopted. The new rule was “grease must come out of each seal”. If not the driveshaft was replaced or, at the very least, scheduled to be replaced on the next outage. The trunnion bearing failing to accept grease was marked with paint so if the driveshaft failed before it could be changed we could for sure point to the lack of lubrication as the culprit.

In the four months following this new rule only one shaft was lost. To date we have lost only 1 more. The mindset now changed to agree that greasing was very important, it is now the #1 priority when the machines go down. Rarely do we go more than 8 weeks between lubrication outages. All three machines can now be shut down with steam left on in the dryer sections since we now have hard piped all the lube points inside those sections to a safe area. 75% of the lubrication points on all three machines are hard piped and are greased on the run twice a week. We plan to finish hard piping the rest of the lube points on all 3 machines by the fall of next year.

As our focus on a regular drive shaft lubrication schedule dramatically improved our reliability, we turned to the task of reducing the amount of crafts people required to accomplish the necessary lubrication. Large air powered grease guns are now placed along the machine where the crews will start on the lubrication outage day. The guns are “tagged” with the name of the crew and extra grease containers are placed for easy replenishment as required. Careful supervision is given to the crews. As some finish early, they are placed in another area of the machine to help. None of the lube crews leave until the machine is complete, we all go home together. With the help of the hard piped grease lines, the drive shaft guards being replaced with new easy to open access doors, and efficient management of the crews we were back to 8 hours of lubrication time on an outage.

As management is never satisfied with the number of people we use during an outage we were asked to reduce the number of contractors. The grease crew was asked to work even more efficiently and give back some crafts people to replace the lost contract people. The main time consumer on a lubrication outage was greasing the drive shafts. Even with easy access doors on the new aluminum guards, our largest machine took 4 people (2 crews), 8 hours to grease the drive shafts. As the automatic system on the market was too expensive and too time consuming to install, we needed a better ‘mouse trap’.

About 12 years ago, the mill started using a small automatic battery powered 4 ounce automatic lube device that was originally used in areas that were unsafe for a lubricator to enter while the equipment was in operation. These performed very well and failures were practically nonexistent. Why not put these on drive shafts? We would not have to use 4 people every 8 weeks per machine to grease. Carver Machine Works, in Washington North Carolina, is a long time provider of excellent machine and field work. They were asked to work with us to come up with a workable unit for testing. We now have a true 8 point lubrication system that delivers grease on a timely basis for up to a year. It is balanced to .01 inches per second @ 540 rpm, @ 705 rpm it’s .02 IPS, this is G1 specs! Delivering small precise amounts of lubricant is greatly superior to flooding the joint every 8 weeks. The grease delivery for each joint is traceable; the amount of grease is easy to see through the clear bowl as the plunger travels down to the bottom. It is an excellent way to monitor the amount of grease going to each trunnion bearing. If one of the plungers stops moving, that particular trunnion bearing may not be receiving lubricant. This is a clear sign to remove that shaft and repair the problem before it causes down time. The True Lube System in constructed of aluminum approximately 16" in diameter, designed to hold 8 lubricators, one for each trunnion bearing on the 2 crosses. It’s totally self contained, has its own power source and can run for up to a year. Lubricant is dispersed from the units either through stainless steel tubing or plastic line depending on the application. It can also be installed in less than a HOUR! Guard modification if necessary would require more time.
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If the cross is drilled for center lubrication, this allows grease to flow in from the top cap and progress to the other three bearings in the cross. Although we have never had a failure on the self contained units, this would be a way to get grease to all 4 bearings in the event one did.

We started testing the units in January of this year on our three-ply machine. The first design used two 4 packs, one pack was placed inside of the dryer next to the steam joint and the second was placed near the gearbox so as to grease all 8 trunnion bearings. The heat near the steam joint resulted in the grease bowls melting. Although the bowl melted, the driver in the unit was still operable. A further testimony to the reliability of these little auto lubbers! A revised True Lubber with all 8 auto lubbers in one pack was designed and located at the gear box end. Tubing with flex Stainless Steel hoses was used to convey the grease to the ‘hot’ end of the shaft. This one performed flawlessly for the 6 months we had set the autolubers to dispense their lubricant. In that six month period we had grease exiting the trunnion bearing seals at all 8 bearings, so much so that we have now moved the cycle out to a year. The True Luber can also be configured to lubricate gear or grid type couplings and use oil if required.

We achieved our second goal of freeing up more crafts people to do other maintenance duties during a machine outage

In conclusion the True Lube has vastly improved the reliability of the mill’s drive shafts and at the same time reduced the number of people required to accomplish thorough lubrication of the machines.

Picture: True-Lube for drive shafts.