Better to Repair or Replace Your Machines?

Across our hire fleet we have a good mixture of both new and old machines. We believe that machines well maintained are more reliable and out-perform badly maintained new ones.

Sometimes, we are asked by customers and machine dealers to service and repair equipment they have purchased at ex-hire auctions, and if you saw the state of them, you’d have to feel for the poor guys who last hired them. Too many in the hire industry fail to maintain and just scrap and replace as and when the machine collapses. For want of a bit of grease, a change of a gasket or reconnecting a loose lead, a repair becomes a restoration project

Over the last ten years there have been no fundamental changes to the basic design of flooring equipment that render older machines obsolete.  So the old saying of ‘look after your tools and they’ll look after you’, is as true today as it ever was.

Unlike your car, a machine doesn’t have to look new, it’s got a job to do but just like your car, if it breaks down the consequences can be a like a bad dream. If you’re working away, on a tight deadline, or on weekends, or if you are left with lots of highly paid workmen milling around, that bad dream turns into a nightmare! And don’t machines seem to know when it is the worst time to breakdown?

There is no reason why a well maintained and looked after machine will not give as good a performance as it did the day it was delivered five or ten years ago, and just as reliable.

The secret is regular maintenance, making sure grease is applied, oil is changed, fraying belts and leaking gaskets are replaced. The cost is minimal whereas the cost of poor maintenance can be horrific, a quick service will circumvent a restoration project or scrapping what should be a perfectly good machine, had it been properly looked after.

There is a lot of routine regular maintenance you can do yourself. If you are a bit nervous or need a few tips you would be welcome to fill in the Contact Us button with the make and model of the machine and a couple of lines about what the problem is, and we will gladly get back to you with a reply or maybe talk you through it.

If you are going to go somewhere local for your breakdown repairs, please make sure that the company you appoint to undertake the repair is competent and fully conversant with both electrical and mechanical repairs. Flooring equipment takes a lot of hammering and some is quite complex and specialised. If you don’t want to risk it, Multi-Hire can collect and re-deliver nationwide; please call for a quote.

A recent example is a restoration project of a large 3 phase SPE DFG 700 triple headed diamond floor grinder. In this particular instance the customer did maintain the machine but the company employed to do this was not au-fait with large electrical equipment and had made quite a hash of its maintenance.

They had replaced seals with silicone resulting in oil leaking from the gearbox, they had overlooked missing teeth on the heads and a cracked centre bearing hub. Worse still they had made a substantial charge to the customer for this non-repair.

In the end a new head, drive gears and bearings were needed. New nitrile seals were fitted to the gearbox and the specialised gear oil was replaced. New belts were fitted, and the heads were greased with extreme pressure grease designed for high intensity loads. The machine needed new head couplings because our predecessor had fitted them incorrectly.

A happy ending: this is the machine just before it was sent back to the satisfied customer, working as new.