There's snow business like quick gearbox repair for bakers16 February 2010

Northern Foods, one of the UK's largest food producers, was kept running during the worst of the recent snow, thanks to a rapid repair on an obsolete sealed motor gearbox at its Gunstones bakery in Sheffield.

The site's maintenance team identified a potential problem on the gearbox before it developed into a breakdown, and used a tight production window to make the repair.

Eriks' depot in Chesterfield received a call at 1.00pm and the unusual hollow shaft housed gearbox and motor unit was collected by 2.00pm. It turned out to be a sealed enclosure with a bevel/helical gear reducer and a three phase ac motor.

Fortunately, Eriks had already surveyed all rotating machines on-site, so its engineers on shift were quickly able to find the specification, performance and usage data - enabling them to diagnose the fault and identify all required parts.
They found that water ingress had caused fretting corrosion of the main output shaft-bearing. While posing no threat of contamination, prolonged operation would have resulted in raised temperature and eventually seizing.

The gearbox was stripped, cleaned, inspected and repaired - including changing the bearing, re-boring and inserting a bush to the housing itself. The gears were inspected and passed. The motor stator was stoved, to ensure no residual moisture, and the supply leads were repaired.

New seals were applied and the unit lubed and re-assembled, ready for shipping. Gunstones received the unit at about 8.00pm the same day.

Brian Tinham

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