Ask a workshop how many magnetic drills it has and you get a number. Ask how many work today and the number usually drops, sometimes by half.
Why a dead machine is invisible
It stops appearing in any figure you look at. It is not on the maintenance schedule because nothing is being maintained. It draws no consumables, so it disappears from the spend report. It sits behind something, and it becomes furniture.
Meanwhile the work it used to do is being routed around it – onto a machine that is now doing double duty, or onto a hand drill, or onto overtime.
The real cost is the routing, not the machine
The capital sitting idle is the smallest part of it. What it actually costs you is:
- Queueing. Two crews waiting on one machine is a scheduling problem nobody logged as an equipment problem.
- The wrong tool. Work that should be on a mag drill going onto something slower or less accurate.
- A worse spare position. When the surviving machine goes down, there is now no fallback and the job stops completely.
- Panic buying. The replacement gets bought under time pressure, at whatever price, in whatever spec is available.
The audit, and it takes an afternoon
- Physically find every machine. Stores, site boxes, the back of the van, the corner behind the racking.
- For each one, write down three things: make and model, does it run, and what is wrong if it does not.
- Note the ones nobody can account for. Machines get lent to sites and never come back. That is worth knowing on its own.
- Photograph the rating plate. It saves a phone call later, every time.
Most workshops that do this find at least one machine that has a trivial fault and has been dead for a year because nobody owned the decision.
Repair or replace
The honest answer depends on the fault and the age, and it is not always repair. What we would want to know before saying either way:
- The model, and roughly how old
- What it is doing, and when it started
- Whether anything changes when you move the cable
- Whether it has been opened already
Some faults are cheap and quick. Some are not worth it on an old machine, and a good supplier will tell you that rather than quote you for it.
One thing not to do
Do not test a magnetic drill under power to “see what it does” if you suspect an electrical fault. It is not a diagnostic step and it can turn a small repair into a large one – or worse.
What to do with the list
Split it three ways: worth repairing, worth stripping for spares, and finished. Then act on all three. A machine on the “decide later” pile is the machine that will still be in the corner next year.
Send us the list
Give us the models and the symptoms and we will tell you honestly which are worth repairing, which are not, and roughly what each would take. We will say so when the answer is no.
Email info@neweratools.com or call +65 6241 0908.