Hydraulic cylinders come in many different shapes and sizes, and are built to serve many purposes. Whilst in most cases, cylinders are designed to serve a specific purpose, they are not always built to suit a specific environment. Whether it’s iron ore, gold or coal, each environment presents a unique range of variables which may affect the service life of your cylinder.
Recently, we had discussions with a mining company that was suffering from constant failures at approximately 450 hours on 793 Rear Suspension cylinders. Each failure resulted in valuable downtime and a warranty claim to the repairer, who simply could not solve the problem.
As always, we love a challenge at Callcott & Downey and we were keen to help the client with a cost effective solution.
The client sent us a pair of the Rear Suspension cylinders which were leaking and in need of repair. After a careful failure analysis, we soon determined that the root cause of the repetitive failure was in the standard seal kit, with a few other contributing factors. The client accepted our report and authorised us to go ahead with the rebuild.
The cylinders went through our repair process and the rods were linished to an optimum surface finish. An upgraded seal design was implemented, the cylinders were tested and returned to our client for installation.
At the time of writing (July 2019), the cylinders are now reported to be at over 1000 hours since the modifications and are still functioning perfectly – a big improvement to the 450 hours they were achieving previously.
Do you have a cylinder which isn’t meeting it’s predicted hours? Do you feel your cylinder should be lasting longer? Is your cylinder costing you a fortune in downtime and change outs? If you can answer YES to any of the above, then you should send you cylinder to Callcott’s and ask us about Failure Analysis and how we can help.
