November 2, 2026 · Indumor
1 Base and leveling · 2 Power · 3 Compressed air · 4 Water or gas · 5 First start.
A car that spent five years under a tarp is not started by turning the key and flooring it. First the oil gets changed, the tires get checked for cracks, the battery gets charged and someone looks for a mouse nest on top of the engine. A machine that sat idle for years is the same story, except that it weighs six tonnes, has a panel full of contactors and a brute-force start can cost you a motor or the whole PLC program. What follows is the list we use in the shop before powering up a sleeping machine, split into before, during and after.
Start by turning it by hand. If the main shaft will not make a full turn, or turns in jerks, the grease in the bearings has hardened and they need to come apart, be cleaned and be repacked. Seals dry out and leak. Belts crack on the inside even when they look fine on the outside; replace them all, they are cheap. Hydraulic hoses carry a manufacturing date, and many manufacturers want them retired at six years. The hydraulic oil gets drained and replaced along with new filters, because years of condensation have collected at the bottom of the tank. Rusty ways get cleaned with a stone and oil. With a grinder, never.
The panel is a chapter of its own. Open it before you energize anything. Nests, droppings and chewed wires turn up more often than anyone would like, and a contactor that has been stuck for years will not release on its own. Motors get checked with a megger, and as a practical reference we do not accept less than 1 megohm between phase and ground. Anything lower is a damp winding, which gets dried in an oven before anyone thinks about starting.
Then the PLC. Several of the older ones, the Mitsubishi FX2N among them, keep the program alive with a battery. If that battery died while the machine was sleeping, the program is gone. Before any power cut or battery swap, plug in the laptop and make a backup. If the memory comes up empty, you will need the program from the manufacturer or a rewrite, which is a job in itself.
Variable-frequency drives have electrolytic capacitors that degrade after years without voltage. Manufacturers ask for them to be reformed: energized gradually, in steps and over hours, before full voltage is applied. A drive switched on cold after eight years can blow up, and that is not a figure of speech. It is a show. An expensive show.
And drain the air lines. There will be water in them.
You start in pieces. Each motor runs first with the coupling open, to check the direction of rotation and listen to the bearings with no load. Then it gets coupled and runs empty for half an hour, with a hand on the bearing caps and an infrared thermometer within reach; a bearing going past 70 °C with no load is sending a warning. Only then does material go in, in steps, and not at full rate on the first day. Listen. A machine that stood idle talks a lot during its first week.
Whatever got replaced at start-up is the base of the maintenance plan. Write down every bearing, belt and hose you changed, with size and part number, because that list is your spares stock for the next few years. And use the fact that the machine is open to measure the wear parts and draw them.
A typical case is a packaging line that spent six years under plastic in a corner of a warehouse. Two motors with zero insulation, a PLC with no program, the drives reformed in an afternoon following the manufacturer's procedure. Two weeks later it was producing. If you have a machine like that and want it looked at before it is switched on, at Indumor we do the inspection and the commissioning, in Córdoba or at your plant in Argentina.
Rigging, hook-up and first start of new, used or imported machines.
View service →We inspect it before it is switched on and run the first start with you.
© Indumor 2010–2026 — Industrial steel fabrication, Córdoba, Argentina
