This Decatur Industrial customer had a failure on a critical 500HP air compressor. While the compressor was in the shop for a recondition, they wanted to install a new motor in the application.  Unfortunately, the compressor OEM had provided a “custom” motor that was now obsolete  No motor manufacturer currently builds a “standard” motor to fit in their present base .  The customer could not wait for a manufacturer to redesign a one-off motor, which would be extremely expensive and with a lengthy lead time, so D.I.E. went to work on a standard motor retrofit design.

Our technicians worked with plant engineering and maintenance personnel to provide an available motor that would meet performance specifications .  We fabricated a steel plating that would adapt the new motor to the base, performed the actual machining of the adapter plates on the customer site to ensure a proper fit, and we modified the junction box to fit customer connections without modifications. This retrofit gave the customer the ability to adapt ANY motor to the fit the application in the future if needed.

The cost to engineer the design and fabricate the existing style base to accept the new motor cost the customer $10,000 – saving them tens of thousands of dollars in downtime and custom motor manufacturing.

Springtime means scheduled plant outages. Scheduling maintenance outages is more complicated that in the past, with many customers in need of more team members.

One of those customers found themselves lacking primarily in skilled millwrights. Knowing that it takes a lot of time to find that kind of talent, they turned to Decatur Industrial to fill the gaps. This facility required a planned daily outage once a week. However, they had been consistently short on manpower to accomplish the job. As a partner to this customer, we offered our millwright services so they could meet their plant performance goal. 

To date, we have logged over 40, 40- hour weeks of millwright work at the customer site. Our team enjoys knowing that our efforts have helped enabled the plant to hit production numbers.

Decatur Industrial has the talent on our team to help customers keep on schedule with items they don’t have the manpower to achieve.  Contact us today to see how we can provide technical services with an upcoming outage.

We can do extensive multi-point inspections of all your rotating equipment, but sometimes the biggest problems are the easiest to find.

To put it simply, the goal of a motor maintenance program is to stop problems before they occur!  Preventive motor maintenance on a regular basis can help prevent motors to fail and thus, prevent unexpected production stops. That’s where WE come in!

With this customer, Decatur Industrial works with them to run a motor maintenance program.  Our techs are trained to check for overheating of motors, bearing failures, and many other potential issues.

In this picture you see a cracked coupling.  Our technician spotted this on a schedule walk-around. We were able to avoid this near failure as well as safety issue. It could have sent debris or coupling pieces flying.

The customer was able to avoid a failure (and potential safety incident) and have it replaced quickly.

Making time for a motor survey and spares audit.

You know your plant and criticality of equipment & we know motors!

Do you know what equipment you have in your plant? The unfortunate truth is that if you are like many others, you don’t!

Decatur Industrial recently helped a customer perform an equipment survey so they understand exactly what they have on hand, especially as it relates to critical equipment.

Our reliability specialist worked with the customer team to survey motors in the plant line by line. We created a list of motors and equipment plus outlined which critical ones need to have spares stocked and ready to go. This list is updated and visible to the customer and Decatur Industrial at all times.

By capturing this data, we can help ensure the customer has immediate access to critical equipment and prevent unnecessary downtime, which can cost up to $25,000 an hour.

Not surprisingly, the Covid-19 pandemic is still affecting labor force participation and unemployment among American workers 18 months after its onset.  Today’s labor shortage remains a major issue for our customers today, as well as ensuring they have the coverage needed to run their facility if employees are quarantined.

One of those customers found themselves lacking primarily in skilled millwrights. Knowing that it takes a lot of time to find that kind of talent, they turned to Decatur Industrial to fill the gaps. This facility required a planned daily outage once a week. However, they had been consistently short on manpower to accomplish the job. As a partner to this customer, we offered our millwright services so they could meet their plant performance goal. These services started at the height of the pandemic and continue to this very day.

To date, we have logged over 40, 40- hour weeks of millwright work at the customer site. Our team enjoys knowing that our efforts have helped enabled the plant to hit production numbers.

Decatur Industrial has the talent on our team to help customers keep on schedule with items they don’t have the manpower to achieve.  Contact us today to see how we can help.