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Long-term, economic operation of your hammermill, wood hog or wood chip rechipper starts with good preventive maintenance.  In all my years of field experience, I have never seen an operation without a preventive maintenance schedule that didn’t eventually end up on someone’s “catastrophic” maintenance schedule.

Today you have a lot more tools to help you keep your hammermill running at top performance. Bearing temperature monitoring systems give you an early warning when this critical component is over heating. Vibration monitoring systems, laser alignment systems, and dynamic balancing equipment all help you make critical adjustments that will extend the life and improve the performance of your wood hog.

One of your best lines of defense is to watch your wear items, and replace them before it’s too late. Jeffrey Rader hammermill users, for example, can easily see when a wear liner is due for replacement by looking at the mounting bolts. A typical breaker plate liner is 2” thick when it is new. It is attached with ¾” diameter mounting bolts. When the liner is worn down to the level of the mounting bolt, you know it has just ¾” thickness left and should be replaced. For those whose hammermill has extra heavy internal wear liners, you’ll find annual inspection is sufficient in most applications.

The good news about wear parts is that we have made many advances in the metallurgy and design of hammers, screen grates, and other internal wear parts. For example Jeffrey Rader developed Ultralloy Dura-Tip hammers that provide both superior wear characteristics and easy change-out. This is a good example how the right replacement parts can shorten down-time and extend maintenance intervals.

Another example is our Slant-Flow screen grate. This design improves material flow without loss of end product size control. It reduces horsepower consumption for equivalent through-put rates, and it extends wear life, reducing the frequency of wear component replacement.  

With the exception of changing hammers, rotor repair is minimal. We recommend metal detection and/or magnets prior to the machine to prevent a large piece of metal from entering the machine and doing serious damage to the rotor. Bearings are the most critical part of the rotor, and maintenance must be performed on them regularly and correctly.

Bearings may be lubricated with grease or recirculating oil. In either case keeping the correct amount of oil or grease in the bearing is critical. The most common mistake is overgreasing bearings or not maintaining filters and coolers on recirculating systems which can cause premature bearing failure. A well designed hammermill uses premium bearings with a B10 design life minimum of 100,000 hours, and many models exceed 250,000 hours B10 design life.

If you start with a quality machine, provide the proper maintenance and use quality parts, you’ll have many years of operation without costly down-time or frequent emergency calls.

Keith Patterson
Manager of Applications & Technical Services
Jeffrey Rader

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