by Danny Stephens | Aug 17, 2026 | ELS Perspectives
ELS Perspectives — Article 2 Most plants I walk into tell me they have a lubrication program. Most of them have a lubrication habit. From across the shop floor the two look identical. Grease guns get pulled. Routes get run. Oil gets changed. Boxes get checked. The...
by Danny Stephens | Jul 20, 2026 | ELS Perspectives
ELS Perspectives — Article 1 I spent 30 years selling lubricants. I called on plant managers, reliability engineers, and maintenance supervisors from one end of this country to the other. I built national accounts, designed training programs, and represented some of...
by Danny Stephens | Jul 13, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 14 Fourteen weeks ago we started with a simple premise: education is the most powerful tool in lubrication. Every article since has built on that premise — wear modes, lubricating films, viscosity, base oils, oxidation,...
by Danny Stephens | Jul 7, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 13 Last week we established that over-lubrication destroys bearings as surely as under-lubrication — and that the correct quantity is a calculation, not a feeling. This week we look at the technology designed to solve that...
by Danny Stephens | Jun 30, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 12 Ask most maintenance technicians whether too much grease can hurt a bearing, and the instinctive answer is no. Grease protects. Grease prevents wear. If a little grease is good, more grease seems like it should be better — or...
by Danny Stephens | Jun 23, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 11 Walk into any maintenance storeroom in any industrial facility and you will find grease. Tubes of it, cartridges of it, pails of it — in different colors, different grades, different brands, stacked on shelves with varying...
by Danny Stephens | Jun 15, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 10 Every week in this series we have looked at a different way lubrication can fail. Wrong viscosity. Wrong film type for the conditions. Oxidation beyond service life. Each one is a real failure mode with real consequences. This...
by Danny Stephens | Jun 10, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 9 Last week we looked at what is actually inside your lubricant — the base oil, the additive package, and in grease, the thickener. This week we look at three properties that determine how that formulation holds up under the...
by Danny Stephens | Jun 1, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 8 Pick up a drum of lubricating oil or a tube of grease and look at the label. You will see a product name, a viscosity grade, maybe an ISO specification or an OEM approval number. What you will not see is what is actually inside...
by Danny Stephens | May 25, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 7 There is a phrase that appears in lubrication engineering education so often it risks becoming invisible through repetition: Viscosity is the single most important physical property of a lubricant. Not one of the most...
by Danny Stephens | May 18, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 6 Last week we established that friction is not an abstract force — it is a physical event happening at the microscopic peaks of every metal surface in your facility, millions of times per second. This week we look at exactly how...
by Danny Stephens | May 11, 2026 | Lubrication Fundamentals Series
Lubrication Fundamentals Series — Week 5 Pick up any bearing from your parts room and look at the race surface. It looks smooth. Polished, even. Under the right light it almost looks like a mirror. Now imagine putting that surface under an electron microscope. What...
