That 'just grease it' advice I got on a 1995 Dover is wrong

Third floor car was shuddering bad on a hospital job in Akron last week, and a senior mechanic tells me to just pack more grease into the guide shoes. I pulled the pads first instead and found the gibs were worn past spec, so no amount of grease was ever gonna fix that alignment. How many of you actually check the gib clearance before reaching for the tube?

1 comments

1 Comment

the_john12d ago

Buddy of mine runs a crew over in Cuyahoga Falls and he had the exact same thing happen on a 2000 model. He spent a whole afternoon pumping grease into those guide shoes because the building super was breathing down his neck. Finally he pulled the header plate and the gibs were so sloppy you could see daylight through the gap. He ended up having to order new gibs and shim the whole carriage assembly, took him two days. The grease just made a mess everywhere and hid the real problem for a while. He still gets sore about it when someone brings up that elevator, says he should have thrown the micrometer on it first thing. Grease is for keeping things smooth, not for fixing wear that's already past the point of no return. So yeah, checking gib clearance before anything else is the only way to catch that kind of thing.