Industrial Maintenance on FST Life

6 posts tagged Industrial Maintenance.

Neal Wareing
Field service technician and founder, FindFST
30 Dec 2026
Looks fine. No comms.
Profinet plug was in the right port, nothing obviously wrong. But the machine wasn't talking. Then look closer and you can see the profinet plug isn't properly closed. The fix isn't pretty. Pipe grips, steady pressure, make sure every pin is actually biting into the conductor. Caveman engineering. But it works. The temptation is always to replace the cable and move on. Takes longer, costs more, and half the time the new one has the same problem if you don't know what you're looking for. A proper crimp tool and a decent RJ45 plug would have avoided all of it.
Neal Wareing
Field service technician and founder, FindFST
23 Dec 2026
Wireway covers belong back on, even the ones we didn't remove...
Wire cuttings belong in the bin, not on the floor. Leaving a mess behind says a lot about attitude. Customers notice. They might not mention it on the day, but it registers. When the next job comes around, they remember the engineer who left things tidy. A site visit is the technical fix, report, and the state of the place when you leave. Tidying up wire cuttings and putting covers back you never took off is part of the job.
Neal Wareing
Field service technician and founder, FindFST
10 Dec 2026
16 motors and gearboxes swapped out. Commissioning time, then I spotted it...
Transport plugs still in. All 16 of them. Gearboxes get hot. Oil expands. Transport plug fitted means pressure has nowhere to go. New gearbox written off before it's run a full shift. Easy fix: swap in a breather plug. Five minute check. Thousands saved.
Neal Wareing
Field service technician and founder, FindFST
3 Dec 2026
Terminals installed directly under a fan
Multiple signals dropping out, no obvious cause. Pulled the covers and found it straight away. Dust being blown directly into the terminals, constantly. Every time that fan runs, it's packing debris into the connections. Not a fault with the signals. Not a fault with the wiring. A fault with where someone decided to put the terminals in the first place. Common sense isn't always common. The fix for the signals was straightforward. Getting someone to relocate those terminals properly is the actual job.
Neal Wareing
Field service technician and founder, FindFST
25 Oct 2026
12 years in field service, you pick up a few tricks.
Intermittent overspeed fault on a servo motor. Cycle the power, fault clears, runs fine for a few days, then it's back. Drive replaced. Motor replaced. Wiring "checked". When someone says they checked the wiring, it's usually a visual check. Doesn't catch this. My trick: run a long wire to the pin at the motor plug, continuity test from the far end, measure resistance on each wire individually. Should be around 1 ohm. Pink wire came back at 70 ohms. That's not a wire fault, that's a connection fault. Pin wasn't properly seated in the plug. Faults like this get power-cycled away for years without ever getting fixed. The drive and motor were never the problem.
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Neal Wareing
Field service technician and founder, FindFST
25 Oct 2026
Rookie mistake that cost me a full day
First time I installed new cables, I did it as fast as possible. Get to the cabinet and all the plugs were damaged, cannot connect them. Spent the remainder of the day fiddling with a screw drive trying to re form the plugs. Spend an extra 10 minutes wrapping the sub-D plugs properly before running new cables. Save yourself hours of messing around trying to re form the plug later. It's a mistake you make once but a sure way to tell if someone is experienced

Industrial Maintenance on FST Life

Looks fine. No comms.

Wireway covers belong back on, even the ones we didn't remove...

16 motors and gearboxes swapped out. Commissioning time, then I spotted it...

Terminals installed directly under a fan

12 years in field service, you pick up a few tricks.

Rookie mistake that cost me a full day