Catastrophic equipment breakdown?

Phil

Phil

Carpal tunnel level member
Location
Oak Lawn, IL
The supject might convey a strong meaning but what i am really asking is, Has anyone ever had all or nearly all of their equipment red tagged (down and inopperable) at the same time? Today was total melt down at our office...funny in one degree because we (the crew) could kind of see it coming and sad in another degree because only 3 guys got to work today. I was one of them :)

Our bigger chipper has bad bearings on the feed wheels, and had a bolt on one of the chipper blades break off so it is down. another chipper has no working tail lights (the mechanic came but the lights were reveresed so when you wanted to signal left the right blinker came on. the trailer that hauls the bobcat and our logs has no working tail lights (again a full day of the mechanic tinkering with it resulted in nothing) our last chipper has the hydraulic arm to raise and lower the feed wheels held together with pullcord string and we replace bolts on it what seems like a regular basis. My bucket truck overheated on the way home from our job today and was pushing antifreeze out from under the radiator cap. all in all it was one crazy day.

i put this in this section to give everyone free rain to complain or boast as to how shody or well their equipment is being maintianed. Please share your different methods for servicing your fleets. and if you are so fortunate to have a competent mechanics...please, give them a pat on the back and don't take them for granted.
 
Phil you make me feel like I'm lucky with just a flat tire on the back of my F650 today.
 
It must be hard to look out for yourself there. Your odds of keeping out of harms way are diminishing with every distraction. The next thing that breaksdown could be you. It is not going to change at this place, if it was it would never gotten so bad to begin with. It comes from not keeping stuff up because the boss runs his crew all the time in the field so hard that there is never time to maintain the equipment. The money goes elsewhere. If you are not paid to mess with trucks then don't! It is to much of a distraction for an employee to wonder about the truck he is driving.

By the way, I go over all vehicles every 3 grand. A safety inspection along with routine service. I won't roll even if it is just a bulb, better to get it taken care of now.It will just cost more for the tow or burial fees.

Can't wait until the springs come for the tree truck. At this rate I will have a new truck in 2 years!
 
Some days become 'Reverse King Midas touch days' Instead of everyting turning to gold at my touch things turn to $#%&*# When that starts to happen I stop and quit touching things for a while.

Doing preventive maintenance is a good safety program for equipment. Even then, sometimes everything bad happens at once.
 
Oh yes yesterday was a fun one. You forgot one thing phil, the muffler cracked from the housing on the mini-bobcat. Also the O-ring on the feed bar blew, on one of our chippers, but that was last week. Preventative maintenance, along with listening to your field crews, would have solved alot of this.
 
Sounds like my work place except we would still get our 8.5 hours. Sounds like you need a new mechanic and a new manager.
 
yeah...we had a different mechanic show up after the first one (our usual guy) failed to fix it in a full day of working on it (the tail lights), but apparently no one told our original mechanic that we were getting someone else to do it so he showed up while the new guy was working on it...so we had the two mechanic stare down...i'm thinking of writing a western novel based on it

as for the manager thingy...i am going to bight my tongue and hope that if armegedon hits in the next week or so...it starts at his house first. that way we can at least celebrate before our house gets hit. (there is a lot of animosity here if you can't tell)
 
Boy could I tell you some manager stories!

It gets even better when you work at a place where profit isn't the bottom line.
 
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