The call came in at 2:00 a.m. on December 28^th—a day that most people are home with their families, enjoying holiday time off.

A food manufacturing plant in the Kansas City area was down with an outage, and they needed help. Help from someone that was dependable and they could trust to immediately get them up and running.  So they called IBT Industrial Solutions.

“The output shaft on their gear reducer was broken, and they didn’t have a spare,” said Tyson Rathfon, the Customer Service Supervisor at IBT’s Kansas City Branch Service Center.  “They needed a new one, fast—because one entire side of the plant was down, and production had stopped.”

Rathfon teamed up with IBT team members James Kilgore, a Service Center Technician, and Tim Zerger, the Business Group Director of Bearings and Power Transmission, to repair or replace the gear reducer on short notice during the Christmas holidays.  The customer delivered the failed gear box to the shop.

Together, the IBT team identified the replacement parts.  After checking their inventory, the team determined they had all the parts required to repair the unit.

Kilgore, who specializes in assembling gear reducers for the IBT gear shop, pulled all the repair parts immediately from inventory, and assembled the new gear reducer in approximately 1 hour.  By 8:00 am, the IBT team had the repaired gear reducer and delivered it to the customer site—a total turnaround time of approximately 6 hours.  The gearbox is still operational today.

“We’ve worked with this client for over 20 years, and we were glad to have the opportunity to assist them,” Rathfon said.  “We enjoy working with them because they appreciate our expertise.  We certainly don’t mind going the extra mile to help out our customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

About IBT’s Gear Shop

IBT’s gear shop offers comprehensive gearbox repair, replacement, predictive maintenance, and design services.  Our team can even examine your old unit to help determine the cause of failure, in order to prevent the same problem from happening again in the future.  We service a wide variety of makes and models, including:  Dodge, Hub City, SEW-Eurodrive, Nord, Flender, Regal Power Transmission Solutions, Rexnord, and more.

Need help from the IBT gear shop?

Contact your local branch service center, or call IBT at (800) 332-2114.  You can also visit IBT Industrial Solutions.