Bite-sized lessons, one break at a time.
Whether you're on a coffee break or between jobs, Maintenance Break is your quick fix of practical insights into asset management, maintenance strategies, and reliability. Hosts Pete and Drew deliver jargon-free tips, real-world examples, and a dash of good humour—all in under 10 minutes.
Perfect for maintenance professionals, engineers, supervisors and anyone looking to make sense of the systems that keep everything running.
New episodes every fortnight.
Because sometimes, all you need is a maintenance break.
Visit us at www.jebsadvisory.com
Three Flags, No Fix: The RCA That Missed a Second Failure
A 785C A-frame bearing failed. Two days of unscheduled downtime, a line bore, a proper RCA.
The RCA was genuinely good. The site found the bearing hadbeen installed wrong six months earlier, rewrote the install procedure, added QA checkpoints. Textbook root cause work.
Pete and Drew walk through what that RCA missed: an existing 1000-hour PM check had already flagged that same bearing out of spec, three times, and none of those flags ever made it into the CMMS. Once the site dug further, the same gap held across the whole mobile work group, not just the one bearing.
This is the Failure Response Model in action, four questionsto walk through after any failure, and why stopping at "we know the cause" isn't the same as being done.
Break Tip: Don't just check whether your PMs are getting done. Check whether the defects they flag get closed out. Pick one asset, pull its last few completed PM sheets, find a flagged comment, and trace it into your CMMS. Did it become a work order? If it didn't, check a handful of other assets the same way. If it's not just the one, you've got a work management gap, not a “bearing” problem.
14 Sept 2026
The 5,000 Hours You Lose When Nobody's Watching
Same site. Same fleet. Same final drives, same duty. Oneera: final drives ran to 20,000 hours before rebuild. A few years later: 15,000.
Nobody decided to stop watching the oil. It just stopped being anyone's daily job.
Pete and Drew break down FLAC (Fuel, Lubricant, Air, Coolant) as the full chain, not just an occasional oil sample: receiving and storing it clean, dispensing it right, monitoring it in service, and acting on what the results tell you. Three people control it day to day: the Maintainer at the dispensing point, the Storeman responsible for clean bulk supply, and the Engineer setting the target and following through on results.
Break Tip: Tomorrow morning, go have a look at your main dispensing point in the workshop, or the quick fill points on anasset's components. Check two things: are fill points capped or protected from the elements when not in use, and is the area around them clean? If you don't have a cleanliness standard, start there. If you do, treat what you find as a work quality education opportunity.
31 Aug 2026
Design for Maintainability: Ten Centimeters to the Left
A grease point on a conveyor drive, tucked behind the guarding. To reach it: isolate the whole conveyor, pull the guard, grease it, put the guard back, re-verify. Half an hour, gone, every single week - for the life of the asset. It could have sat ten centimeters to the left and never needed any of it. That's design for maintainability in one image. Not a poster slogan - a specific check run during the engineering phase, before a design becomes real.
Pete and Drew walk through what that review actually looks like (asset classes, access criteria, a walk-through for what's built and a desktop review for what's still on paper), then take it through the PCR Triad: the buried grease point and ground-level motors that cost hours in avoidable labour and downtime, the crane access nobody planned for, and the harder truth on Risk - jobs that are difficult by design are jobs that get skipped under pressure, and a skipped task can resurface months later as a "mechanical failure" that was never really mechanical at all.
Break Tip: pick an asset that's about to be built, under construction, or one your team always complains about. Trace every lubrication, filter, and inspection point and ask whether it's genuinely easy to access, replace, or maintain - including whether there's room for the crane, not just the person. Flag anything that fails. That one flag might be the difference between a pen mark on a drawing and a retrofit years down the track.
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