Failure Analysis Made Simple: Bearings and Gears

Stop Guessing, Start Solving: The Field Guide to Bearing and Gear Failure Analysis

Overview

Speculating about "bad metal" or "bad luck" wastes critical downtime and often leads to repeat failures. This book strips away the complexity of tribology and metallurgy, giving you a practical, physics-based roadmap to determine exactly why a component failed so you can ensure it never happens again. This is not an academic textbook. It is a dirty-hands field manual for the plant floor.

What this Book will help you do

• Eliminate Root Cause Guesswork: Use the specific "Yes/No" Diagnostic Charts to identify the physical cause of failure 90% of the time without needing a metallurgist.   
• Quantify the Cost of Overload: Articulate to operations why pushing a machine just a little harder destroys reliability by showing how doubling the load cuts bearing life by a factor of 8.   
• Master Lubrication Physics: Stop treating "oil as oil". Understand the mechanism of Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication and how viscosity transforms from "antifreeze" to "honey" under pressure to separate metal surfaces.   
• Spot "Killer" Installation Errors: Identify immediate installation defects, such as improper oil groove locations that bleed pressure and destroy plain bearing load capacity.   
• Distinguish Wear from Failure: Differentiate between "normal dedendum wear" caused by sliding velocity and catastrophic fatigue, allowing you to make data-driven replacement decisions.   
  

Who is it for?

• The Maintenance Supervisor: Who is tired of changing the same bearings every six months and wants to prove the problem is installation, not the part.
• The Reliability Engineer: Who needs a desk reference to validate their RCA findings with hard physics rather than opinion.
  

The Payoff Calculation (ROI)

The price of this book is likely less than 0.1% of a single gearbox replacement. If this guide helps you catch just one misalignment issue or one contaminated oil fill before failure, it pays for itself instantly.

Complete Your System

This book provides the deep technical "source code" for the REM (Reliability Engineering for Maintenance) domain. To build the management system that supports these technical practices, pair this with the Uptime® Elements Body of Knowledge (BoK).

About the Author

Neville Sachs applied the fit tolerances and failure analysis methods outlined in this book to cut motor replacements in his own plant by 50%, doubling the average motor life from 5.4 to 10.9 years.