What useful life can you expect from a motor if it is installed and maintained with an eye toward precision?
While I have no data on the failure rate of lift motors, electric, the issue of vibration has to be one that many of you have had to deal with over time. The elimination or near elimination of vibration with anything mechanical is a important part of extending the life cycle of any piece of equipment.
I am sharing a link to an article on vibration. It is not specific to the ski industry but if one reads, and imagines when the article mentions a machine motor that the article is talking about a lift motor, or a snowmaking pump, the article has value for us in the ski industry.
I know from my own experience where a coupling alignment was moved out of alignment due to vibration, went undetected for some time and even with the lift manufacturer initially repairing the alignment was not corrected, and the failure repeated itself. Finally a vibration analysis was done and the issue was solved with realignment and a remounting,
Now vibration is more easily detected with sensors that are not very expensive. In fact there are smartphone apps available to record vibration frequencies. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a nice to have process in place and I am sure that some of you are way ahead of me. But, this is an area where our creativity can yield pay back with life extensions of certain pieces of equipment with bottom line impact.
