Every plant engineer has felt the heat of plant management breathing down their neck when a primary boiler feed pump or kiln drive trips. The immediate instinct is to swap the part as fast as possible and restart.
However, replacing a failed bearing without understanding why it failed guarantees it will fail again within weeks. Was it lubrication starvation? Was it angular misalignment? Was it electrical fluting from a variable frequency drive? Was it axial thrust overload?
Always bag and tag failed parts. Inspect the fracture surface before grease is wiped away. Take oil samples before draining. When you preserve the physical evidence, the machine will tell you the exact truth of what killed it.
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