No Equipment is "No Maintenance"

When a salesman tells you that you never have to worry about maintenance on a piece of equipment, be very wary.

We are learning that every piece of equipment needs maintenance, some more than others.  Keeping maintenance logs for the various machines can be very helpful.  But a regular careful inspection is also a good idea.  I'm not sure how long one of the disks on our harrow had been freewheeling, but by the time we noticed it the disk had done some serious damage to the shaft. The hole in the middle of the disk, which should be a square and fitting tightly onto the shaft, was almost a perfect circle.  By twirling around the shaft instead of fitting onto it, the disk had worn a ring into the shaft that can't be repaired.

So we have added disk observation to our long list of inspections and shaft replacement to our long list of maintenance.