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February 2026
Featured Article
Over the years, I’ve seen my share of lubrication-related failures, and a surprising number of them turn into full-blown investigations. Bearings don’t just fail, as Jim Fitch likes to say; they’re murdered. When failures happen, we’re left standing in the middle of a crime scene trying to figure out who did it, how, and why.
Raise your hand if oil analysis is part of your job. Now, keep it up if you also do oil analysis on your personal vehicle. Let me guess: you just put your hand down. That’s the same reaction I got at this year’s Reliable Plant Conference. In a room full of reliability professionals—people who live and breathe condition monitoring—only a few went so far as to test the oil in their own cars
What Is a Worm Gear? A worm gear is a gear consisting of a shaft with a spiral thread that engages with and drives a toothed wheel. Worm gears are an old style of gear, and a version of one of...
What does reliability look like when your assets aren’t bolted to the floor—but hauling 200 tons of ore up a 6% grade? In this episode of Gear Talk, host Wes Cash sits down with Terry Taylor, a veteran of mining and heavy industry, to explore reliability in mobile equipment environments.
In the cement manufacturing world, the raw mill is the quiet workhorse—grinding limestone, clay, and other ingredients into raw meal, the critical precursor for clinker production. Clinker is the hot, marble-sized product discharged from the kiln and ultimately ground into cement, making the raw mill’s performance foundational to the entire plant...
Oil analysis is one of the most powerful tools available for understanding machine health, but only when the right tests are run and the results are acted on in time. With dozens of available tests available, it can be tempting to overanalyze or, just as often, miss critical data that points to developing problems.
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