by Danny Stephens | Oct 19, 2026 | ELS Perspectives
ELS Perspectives — Article 4 Every lubrication program will lose the person who understands it best. Not might. Will. People retire, get promoted, move to another plant, or just move on. The only question is whether the program leaves with them — and most of the time,...
by Danny Stephens | Sep 21, 2026 | ELS Perspectives
ELS Perspectives — Article 3 Most lubrication programs don’t fail in year three. They fail on day one — before a single drop of oil ever moves. By the time the symptoms show up, the mistake is already years old. I’ve watched plants launch brand-new...
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...
