As happens most Saturday mornings at Fletcher Moorland, the phone starts to ring and there’s a customer on the line with an urgent breakdown which needs sorting. Most calls at the weekend will be calmly and professionally handled by Jennie, who then puts the wheels into motion to make sure we do all that we can to get our customers back up and running.
This Saturday just gone, one such call was received by a local manufacturer of roofing tiles and building products. They had a line down and the reason was a gearbox which had failed. Our driver was dispatched to bring the unit back to our works for an urgent repair.
Once dismantled we found the gearbox was in quite a sorry state with collapsed bearings, damaged journals, and damaged housings. Luckily the gears were in a serviceable condition. Now here’s where I would have said that we should be supplying a new unit due to the condition of the one in our dismantling & diagnosis area. All fine of course if we knew who the OEM was, and if it was a weekday. It wasn’t though, a repair was needed and quickly.
We’ve been sending email videos of the condition of all the equipment we repair for nearly 12 months now using our SERVICEview facility, so, the diagnosis engineer shot a video and emailed this to the customer.
By now the customer has phoned as he’s in a high-pressure situation and want’s to know when he’ll be getting the gearbox back. It was great to hear from him that he was able to show his managers the video, they understood what work was required which took some of the pressure off him.
Now the repair itself, it was quite extensive the reclamation work needed, however, our machinists go on with sleeving both ends of the output shaft, dressing the gears, setting the casing on our horizontal borer to bore out and sleeve the bearing housings. We check all bearing fits with a CMM to ensure correct sizing to tolerances have been achieved. We also have a great out-of-hours bearing supplier, Hayley, who dropped off the tapered bearings we didn’t have in stock, this enabled us to complete the repair on Sunday without having to wait an extra day to get the bearings needed.
It’s great knowing that being open 24 hours a day, every day of the year and having an attitude for what ‘can be done’, brings customers back to when they need us most.