Shoutout to the crew that caught a worn sheave groove before it snapped a cable

I was on a call for a noisy elevator in a 15 story building downtown last Tuesday. The noise was this high pitched whine on every trip. I pulled the inspection plate and saw the main sheave grooves were worn almost a quarter inch deeper on one side than the others. The crew before me just kept adding grease, which made it worse. If that groove had worn through, it would have started cutting into the cable strands. Has anyone else run into a case where the fix someone else tried actually made the real problem harder to spot?

3 comments

3 Comments

corar782mo ago

Exactly, @claire992, that grease just hid the alignment issue. You gotta check the sheave seat and bearings first.

claire9922mo ago

So they just kept greasing it? Did you find out why the groove wore down so uneven in the first place, like was the sheave out of alignment?

the_kevin2d ago

Read something similar on a machinist forum, uneven groove wear almost always means the sheave is slightly bent.