It is all too common, the question of what is brinelling, what is flaking, what even causes bearings to fail, comes up. Any bike, any rider has asked one of these questions or something similar. Most often bearings fail because of poor handling, whether it be lubrication, maintenance or reliability program.
What do all of these have in common? Human error, more specifically, the lack of healthy reliability and maintenance practices.
One of major aspects of reliability program is learning from our mistakes. Root cause failure is key to learning where faults are and more specifically how we fail bearings, rather than why the bearing failed us.
Different failure mode teaches us different aspects of bearing’s life and how we can change our current practices to promote better bearing health. Various failure modes can be effective learning tools. Some of the failure modes are:
1. Lube failure
2. Thermal stress
3. Vibration and Shock stress
4. Mechanical Stress.
In addition to bearing failure modes, we can look at bearing damage to determine what caused premature failure, which will lead to prevention of such bearing damage thus eliminating the risk of crankshaft failure.
Want to know the mitigation plan? visit us in the garage!
Regards,
Prof's Garage