An Optimal Maintenance Strategy for Effective Utilization of Engineering Workshop in Technical Institutes

Engineering workshop at the institute level is an important instructional area in the campus. It is subjected to frequent changes in operators after one batch of student to another. Workshop Supervisor and instructors face an uphill task to maintain the machine tools to be made available to students in good state of condition. Lack of experienced maintenance personnel and unavailability of time slot in the working hours leaves the machine tools unwarranted to any of the standard maintenance procedures. It is common scenarios in every institute to witness machine tools are under maintenance and less numbers available in commensurate to the students in the batch of 15 to 20. The paper recommends the combination of Preventive and Condition-Based Maintenance procedure to be followed to ensure all time availability of machine tools to the students in every batch. Recommendations on testing methods, maintenance plans is included to assist the Instructors and supervisor. Method of maintenance for several components of different machine tools is also elaborated.