When we recently ran across this article by Mary Gannon on Hose Assembly Tips, we knew we had to share it with our readers!
Brand new hoses seem like they should be clean, right? After all, if you’re buying a new hose you assume it has never been used so it should be clean. Gannon, however, is swift to point out that most hose manufacturing facilities don’t have any type of cleaning steps in their fabrication process. How dirty could a hose get at a manufacturing facility? It turns out, a hose can get pretty dirty on its journey from the manufacturer to you as a finished assembly.
The first dirt offender is picked up in the manufacturing process; residual mandrel lubricant can be found in nearly every hydraulic hose when it comes from the manufacture because they never clean it at the manufacturing facility.
The second source of contamination is from the cutting or crimping that that is part of the hose customization process. Cutting the hose creates rubber dust that collects in the hose, and crimping creates metal shards. Not good!
The last type of contamination is just plain old dirt and dust. Hoses can pick up dirt as they are being moved from manufacture to distributor, or from the distributor to your work site. Also, since most hoses don’t immediately fly off the shelves as soon as they get to the distributor, hose tends to do a fair bit of sitting around gathering dust.
So why does contamination matter? In many applications contamination is not going to cause any major problems. However, hydraulic hose is used for hydraulic oil which absolutely must be kept clean.
The main reason to clean your hydraulic hose is to protect the equipment you are running. Any company running heavy expensive machinery that uses hydraulic hoses does not want their machines breaking down due to contaminants in the hose. Down time costs time and money they can’t afford in the competitive job markets they serve.
The good news is that you can avoid contaminating your hydraulic oil by simply cleaning the hose before you use it. Cleaning hydraulic hose is a pretty straight forward process that involves a pneumatic machine called “Ultra Clean” that cleans the whole length of hose. Amazon Hose has Ultra Clean machines at all of our locations! Clean hydraulic hoses are standard for all OEM customers and is available upon request for our counters. There is no charge for this service at the time of this writing.
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Click here to read the full article on Hose Assembly Tips.