Treating It as an Investment: 5 Steps Towards Protecting Your Industrial Machinery

Spending precious resources on the acquisition of a new machine can easily be the best available move for a business. In some cases, though, companies that make major investments fail to protect the assets they acquire appropriately.

Keeping an industrial machine properly protected inevitably costs far less than the purchase price. In fact, protecting a machine can generally be regarded as an especially sound investment in its own right. A quick look at some of the threats that need to be accounted for will reveal that there are always effective ways to respond.

Some industrial machines are so large and imposing that they might seem virtually immune to damage. In practice, though, all pieces of equipment have weak points that need to be protected.

Fortunately, simply thinking about the dangers that a given machine will face will almost always suggest appropriate forms of protection. The five kinds of threats that need to be accounted for most often are:

Liquids:

Even a bit of water, lubricant, or other liquid that works its way into an unwanted place can cause expensive damage to an industrial machine.

As those who see machine way covers: Online will discover, though, there are affordable products that can forbid entry to liquids no matter what the situation. Liquids that could seep at atmospheric pressure into cracks and apertures tend to be easiest to account for. When pressure might be an issue, it will often be necessary to make use of more comprehensive protective measures.

Debris:

Even well-kept industrial facilities often feature a bit of disorder. Objects of various kinds and sizes that end up within industrial machines can cause huge amounts of damage quite quickly.

Given that something as simple as a hydraulic press Can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, keeping debris at bay should always be a priority. While it will generally be best to preemptively emphasize cleanliness, actively adding debris-blocking safeguards will provide another layer of protection.

Chemicals:

Solvents, reagents, and even cleaners found in many industrial facilities can wreak havoc on certain machines.

While there are Well-Established Rules: Governing the handling of most volatile chemicals, few of these account for the safety of industrial equipment. Policies that keep dangerous chemicals far away from machines they could damage should be developed and enforced at all times.

Abrasives:

Foreign objects that can cause damage all at once are of great concern in many industrial environments. There are other types of substances, though, that takes more time to cause equally significant amounts of trouble. Even trace amounts of abrasive material that end up in contact with a machine’s moving parts and working surfaces can wear them down over time. Because many abrasives consist of relatively fine particles, protective measures designed to work at a grosser level will often be of no use at all.

Impacts:

A single errant forklift or tumbling barrel can cause huge amounts of damage to an expensive piece of machinery. Permanent and semi-permanent protective assets like bollards, rails, and cages can be used to make such incidents a lot less likely. In just about every case, it will pay to implement safeguards that account for and reflect the impact hazards most typical of a given environment.

Even when it costs significant amounts of money to account for hazards like these, the results will often justify the expenditure. Protecting a valuable piece of industrial equipment appropriately can eliminate several sources of risk, making for a more lucrative investment, in the end.