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Noise, vibration and heat from a servo motor do not tell you whether the fault is mechanical or electrical — the same symptoms appear on both sides. A worn bearing, a damaged encoder cable, a contaminated connector and a drive fault can all present as a rough-running axis, and ABB notes that electrical bearing damage…
Siemens’ “type cancellation” for the SIMATIC S7-300 and ET 200M systems took effect on 1 October 2025 (PM410). From that date, those components are no longer sold as new project hardware — they are available only as spare parts, or through repair and exchange, in quantities customary for spares. Siemens’ stated successor direction is the…
If you’ve ever looked at an Allen-Bradley servo motor nameplate — something like MPL-B4540F-MK74AA — and wondered whether that string of letters and numbers actually means anything, it does. It’s not decoration. Each segment encodes real information about the motor family, frame size, and configuration, and reading it correctly is the fastest way to identify…
If your team has noticed longer lead times or higher prices on memory modules for legacy PLCs this year, you’re not imagining it. Several industry sources have flagged 2026 specifically as the point where sourcing obsolete PLC components shifted from an occasional inconvenience to a real operational risk — and legacy memory modules are one…
When we launched the free Servo Health Check, the most common question we got back wasn’t “does it work” — it was “how does it work.” Fair question. A maintenance decision tool is only useful if you can see its logic, not just trust its output. So here is exactly how the tool arrives at…
“How many hours before this servo motor needs attention?” is a fair question, and the honest answer only exists if it comes from the manufacturer’s own manual — not from a guess based on how the motor sounds today. Below are the verified service-life intervals published by Yaskawa and Panasonic for two current servo families,…
Allen-Bradley’s SLC 500 platform is one of the most widely deployed PLC families ever built — and one of the largest installed bases still running today despite being long discontinued. If your line depends on a 1747-series processor, the practical question isn’t whether the platform is old. It’s whether the specific catalog number on your…
If you run Yaskawa SGDM or SGDH servopacks, you have probably already noticed that Yaskawa’s own documentation no longer treats this generation as current. That is not a rumor — it is a documented, phased wind-down, and it changes how you should plan maintenance for these drives. This article explains what “end of factory support”…
When an automation part on a running machine is discontinued, the machine does not stop needing that part. It stops being able to order it from the manufacturer. The practical question for a maintenance team is no longer “can we buy it” — it is “what exactly do we have, and which of the available…
Every obsolete part starts the same way: it fails, and the maintenance team discovers that the OEM stopped making it years ago. What looked like a straightforward spare-part order becomes a decision with three very different paths — repair what you have, replace it with something current, or source the original from somewhere in the…
