Crimping machine maintenance: grease decides everything
Scheduled maintenance of a crimping press is simple and described in the documentation, but one operation stands apart — greasing the sliding surfaces. We explain what to grease and with what, what to replace on schedule, and why on machines from the LT-P120 up this care is automated.
A crimping machine is a hardy piece of equipment: hardened mechanics, simple hydraulics, a service life of tens of thousands of cycles. The overwhelming share of its failures come not from age but from neglect of one operation that takes five minutes. So we start with it and leave the scheduled details for the second half of the article.
Grease is the most important thing
On every cycle the base dies slide over the cone of the head under the machine's full force — hundreds of tonnes spread over a few sliding surfaces. While there is a film of grease between steel and steel, the unit works for years. Once the film is gone, scoring appears on the cone, the dies close unevenly, the crimp diameter starts to scatter across the flats, and it all ends with an expensive head repair. It is the most common and at the same time the most preventable failure of crimping presses.
What to grease with. A grease with molybdenum disulphide (MoS₂): the reference is Molykote BR2 Plus, and an equivalent with a molybdenum additive will do. Molybdenum grease withstands high contact pressures and is not squeezed out of the sliding zone — ordinary lithium grease is no substitute here. Russian-made equivalents exist too: we supply the standard grease for Link Technology machines — order it with the machine or separately.
Where and when. The sliding surfaces — the head cone, the guides and the faces of the base dies — according to the manual of the specific machine: the documentation lists the points and the intervals for a typical load.
Series presses: lubrication is automatic. For serial-production machines — from the LT-P120 up — an automatic lubrication system is available as an option: it feeds grease to the sliding points itself, and the operator only watches the reservoir level. For production running thousands of cycles a shift this removes the human factor entirely.
The schedule: what to replace and when
The rest of the maintenance is a short list; every operation is described in the machine documentation and done in-house:
| Operation | Interval |
|---|---|
| Greasing the sliding surfaces of the head | regularly, a little at a time — per the manual |
| Hydraulic oil change | once a year |
| Oil filter change | together with the oil |
| Springs between the dies | as they wear |
| Hydraulic seals | as they wear |
A few pointers to the table. The oil type and volume are in the machine passport. The return springs between the dies announce themselves: the dies start returning sluggishly or unevenly — the set is changed in minutes. The seals ask for replacement when weeping appears on the rod or the cycle speed drops. All of these are normal consumable parts, not signs of a "dying" machine.
A separate point of care is the cleanliness of the die seats in the head: dirt under a die distorts the closing and the diameter. Why the working face of the dies themselves must stay smooth is covered in the article on dies; how wear and dirt show up in measurements — in the articles on crimp charts and defects.
Cutting and skiving machines: no special schedules
Cutting and skiving machines have no specific maintenance. Two simple rules: remove chips and the waste of cutting and skiving in good time — rubber crumbs and metal dust must not accumulate in and around the machine — and watch the cutting tool: sharpen or replace the knives and cutting blades. How to tell that a blade is due for replacement is covered in the article on cutting; the skiving process itself — in the article on hose skiving.