Tips for extending the life of your gear couplings

As a user of gear couplings, you can know how much they work for you. Gear couplings can give you more power than all other types of couplings. Even if you abuse your links, they still provide high performance. The only thing that should bother you is its service.

The service life of gear couplings is reduced due to wear on their teeth. Fortunately, this wear is slow, not sudden. If you are serious enough to extend the life of your couplings a bit, consider servicing them periodically. In this article, you will learn about the maintenance aspect of your gear couplings.

There are two types of gear couplings:

Low speed (or low performance) and high speed (or high performance). To avoid excessive complexity, let us analyze the service aspect of only standard low speed gear couplings. Lubrication is a keyword to remember when thinking about keeping your acoplamientos.

The forces between the clutch teeth and the oscillatory movement of the gear couplings tend to remove lubricants from the surface. Lubricants act in the open area when the tooth slides to the other side. To carry out its work, the lubricant must have a sufficiently high viscosity and should be able to use the available time between two cycles.

When you think about lubricants, you can think of two things: oil and fat. In fact, fats are nothing but oils in which a thickener is added. Fats are more beneficial than oils because they are easier to seal and remain where lubrication is required.

In addition to high speed and low speed couplings, gear couplings can also be classified according to the type of seal. One type is a metal seal (or quick type), and the other is a type of elastomeric seal. Oil cannot be used for elastomeric sealing couplings due to its inability to hold a sufficient amount of lubricant in static conditions. You can use oil or grease for all metal seals. Use grease instead of oil if grease is available. If you cannot find a good lubricant, just use a high viscosity oil.

Gear coupling manufacturers also recommend lubrication as their preferred lubricant

You can distinguish good quality fat from others based on some properties. Good quality grease should contain at least 92% oil, the rest is soap. If the percentage of soap is higher, the surface of the teeth is likely to receive less lubrication. A good quality grease should also have a high viscosity base oil. Again, the grease should be able to withstand centrifugal separation. Very few companies can set benchmarks for the latter function. The grease of your choice should produce as little oil as possible, and also as slowly as possible. Some good-quality lubricants also receive special additives, such as extreme pressure additives, to extend their life.