The call came in unexpectedly to our sales rep. A crucial Lightnin 780 mixer gearbox was in total failure and had shut down a line at a nearby specialty polymers plant. Knowing the cost of lost production time but not the extent of the damage in the failed unit, the customer‘s reliability engineer needed the repair completed in three days.
Of course, we said yes. Then what happened?
Recently, a cement manufacturer asked us to rebuild its 145,000-pound Flender KMS1100 vertical mill drive during its scheduled 14-day maintenance window.
But weight wasn’t our only challenge …
Human beings have been using gears and gearboxes for thousands of years. From the mundane to the magnificent, gearboxes help us in ways most people never see. But as we in the industry know, from the paper products we all rely on to the tires our cars run on and the cement we build on, gearboxes keep the world running.
Recently, an historic hurricane reminded us that sometimes our work can protect and even save lives.
Since a single failed gearbox can shut a plant down, the tangible downtime costs for a failed gearbox at a large manufacturer can be as much as $20 million per day.
We reengineered, upgraded and manufactured the entire contents of the box. The only thing we kept was the totally transformed box.
