Lubrication Schedule & Log

What this tool does

CM8-278 plans and records lubrication. You list every point that needs grease or oil, group the points into walking routes, give each one a product, a colour code, a quantity, a method and an interval in days, then close each service out as it is done. The tool shows what is due, what is overdue and by how long, the share of services finished on or before their due date, and what the round found.

It is a schedule and a log, not a specification. What a bearing needs, how much, and how often comes from the manufacturer's documentation; this tool makes sure that specification is followed and evidences it. Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

Why lubrication pays, and why it is the first thing dropped

Of everything a maintenance team does, lubrication has the highest return per hour spent and the lowest status. Rolling-element bearings rarely wear out the way a design-life curve suggests. They fail early, and when failed bearings are stripped the causes cluster in the same few places: the wrong lubricant, not enough of it, far too much of it, or lubricant that was correct on the day it went in and had since been contaminated with water, coolant, dust or wear metal. Fatigue from honest running hours is a minority cause. A gearbox that seizes at a third of its expected life usually seized because the oil stopped being oil, not because the gears wore away.

And yet it is the first job dropped when the shift runs short, because it is invisible in both directions. Doing it produces nothing you can point at — no repaired machine, no closed job card. Not doing it also produces nothing, for weeks or months, until a bearing that has run dry since the spring fails in the autumn and is written up as a random failure. The loop between the missed round and the breakdown is so long that nobody connects them. That is what a register fixes: it makes the missed round visible on the day it is missed, not six months later when the failure has destroyed the evidence.

Points and routes

One row is one lubrication point serviced once — the front spindle bearing on lathe L2 on a particular date, not "lathe L2". A machine may have twelve points on four products at three intervals, and lumping them into one "lubricate L2" line is how points get quietly lost. Name the point so somebody who has never done the round can find it, and note awkward access: access is the best single predictor of whether a point gets serviced.

The route field exists because walking order beats asset order. Group points by area and by interval, not by machine. "Route A — weekly, machine shop", forty minutes covering every weekly point in that bay, is a job somebody can be given, timed and held to; "everything on the CNC lathes" sends the same person past the same machine three times a week and will not survive a busy shift. Aim for one route per interval per area, ordered the way a person walks.

Colour coding and cross-contamination

Mixing lubricants is one of the few maintenance mistakes worse than doing nothing. Gear oil in a hydraulic reservoir, or an incompatible grease into a housing already packed with a different thickener, can turn the lubricant into a soap or a sludge that blocks passages and stops carrying load — and the machine keeps running for weeks while it happens, so nobody links the failure to the fill. The fix is a colour code applied in three places at once — a tag on the point, a label on the container, and a matching band on a dedicated gun, can or pump used for that product and nothing else. Blue for hydraulic oil, red for gear oil, yellow for grease, green for slideway oil; the colours matter far less than using the same ones everywhere and never sharing transfer equipment between products.

Setting the interval

Take the interval from the manufacturer's documentation first. Where that gives a range, or where your duty is heavier than the assumed one — high load, speed or temperature, wet or dusty conditions, vibration — shorten it.

This tool schedules on calendar days, which is a deliberate compromise. Much lubrication guidance is expressed in running hours, and that is more correct: a bearing on a machine running two shifts accumulates twice the revolutions per week as the same bearing on one, and needs its grease twice as often. Calendar scheduling wins on practicality — a round that happens beats a perfect interval that does not. Live with the compromise by setting each interval from the expected running hours of that asset, and shortening it for high-utilisation machines rather than applying one site-wide figure.

Quantity discipline — more is not better

Record the quantity and the unit, and treat the number as a specification rather than a suggestion. Over-greasing is a genuine failure mode, not a wasteful habit. Grease packed beyond the free volume of a housing is churned rather than carried, raising the operating temperature, degrading the base oil and cooking the grease hard. The excess pressure blows out shaft and lip seals, which then admit exactly the dust and water the seal existed to keep out. "A few extra pulls while I am here" is not generosity, it is damage. Three strokes means three strokes. The consumption tile totals the dominant unit only — shots, millilitres, litres and grams are never added together.

Condition findings — free reliability data

Somebody is already standing at the machine with the guard open. Recording what they saw costs seconds and produces the most useful early-warning data on site. A reservoir repeatedly low on arrival is a leak you have not found yet. Contaminated oil — milky, grey, gritty, dark — points at a seal, a breather or a coolant path, and is the reason to take a sample rather than simply refill. The tool insists a contamination or leak finding carries an action, because a finding with nothing raised against it is just a feeling.

The findings donut is also a check on the log itself. A round reporting "normal" on every point on every visit for months is not evidence of a healthy plant; it is evidence the box is being ticked from the doorway.

Skipped points are scheduling debt

Marking a point skipped is honest and allowed — the machine was running, the area was blocked. Skipping it silently is not, so the tool requires a note. A skipped point is a deferral, not a closed job, and the interval keeps running underneath it, which is why skipped points stay in the overdue count. Read the pattern: the same point skipped three cycles running is a machine whose lubrication cannot be done during production, and the answer is an engineering change — an extension line, a remote bank of nipples, an automatic lubricator — or a planned stop.

Measuring compliance

The tile counts every scheduled service whose due date has passed, excluding rows marked "not applicable this cycle", and asks what share were completed on or before that date. A service done late counts as a miss; so does one still outstanding. The chart applies the same formula month by month, grouped by due month rather than completion month, so a job done six weeks late lands against the month it was owed instead of flattering the month it was finally done. The current month is always partial.

Sites that have never measured lubrication compliance usually assume they are at ninety-something and discover they are near half. Below about seventy per cent the schedule is fiction, and the intervals or routes need redesigning rather than enforcing. Note what the measurement does not do: it gives no credit for partial work, and says nothing about whether the service was done well. Compliance measures occurrence; the condition findings are the only signal here that speaks to quality.

Lubrication forming part of a wider planned job — a full service where greasing is one line among twenty — belongs in the Preventive Maintenance Schedule rather than here, so the same work is not counted twice.

FAQ

One row per point, or one row per service? Per service. The point and its schedule fields repeat on each row, which is what lets the tool measure compliance over time and show the history of findings at that point. Copy the last row forward for the next cycle and change the dates.

What is the next-due column for? It projects the following service from the completion date plus the interval, or from the due date where the point has not been done. Basing it on completion lets a late service push the schedule out — usually right for condition reasons, sometimes wrong for planning.

Why does the date filter hide my outstanding points? The date range filters on the completed date, so points not yet done have no date to match. Clear the range to see what is outstanding.

Saving your work

Points, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether the product on the row is the right product, whether the quantity suits the housing, whether two lubricants are compatible, or whether a calendar interval is safe at your running hours. Each of those is a specification question, and getting any of them wrong will damage machinery faster than missing a service.

Follow the equipment manufacturer's lubricant specification and interval, and involve a competent lubrication engineer where the documentation is silent or the duty is unusual. This planner schedules and records; it does not specify. It is a record-keeping and compliance-measurement aid, not engineering advice.