Last month one of our team, Rob, was having one of his regular meetings on a client’s site when they mentioned they were keeping a spare engine in their stores.
When you’re reliant on engines as part of your safety system, having a spare one is very sensible, but in this particular instance, there was a big problem.
If they had needed to use that engine to get back online quickly, it wouldn’t have worked.
After an initial inspection of the engine, Rob quickly spotted that it had various assemblies that were different from their currently installed engines, which would have made it impossible to transfer engines quickly.
But during the full inspection, back in our workshop, we came across an even bigger problem – this is what we found on the camshaft:
It might not look much, but when carrying out a full ultraviolet magnaflux test, things looked a bit different:
If these issues had been missed, it could have led to the camshaft breaking and expensive downtime, especially considering its application.
This is a good reminder for all of us not to accept visual inspections of critical components.
With a replacement camshaft and the correct ancillaries, our client will have a spare engine again, but this time they’ve got one they can actually rely on!
