Reliability Personified

If you're like me, the thought of having to maintain the machine in the photo, presents a challenge to say the least!

It operated at A.W.Stanfield in Mascot from 1933 to 2000 and produced the wooden-based, Supreme mousetraps that we all used at some stage. 

Over 100 million traps were made on the machine over the 56 years of operation, which is simply amazing.  I can only imagine the maintenance plans developing and changing over time and the number of times they faced material shortages and obsolescence of parts. 

I have to believe that they did not rely on breakdown maintenance strategies, but developed sophisticated plans to provide the reliability the Business needed.

How would you approach the reliability support for such a machine?  Could we do it now?

 (Original article by Branko Miletic, in Manufacturer's Monthly, circa 2002)