As everybody who works closely with hydraulic equipment and has to deal with failed components knows, some manufacturers have been known to try anything to deny warranty claims.
Of course, we cannot say that every warranty claim is legitimate, in some cases they are clearly NOT. However, when a component does fail ahead of time, it’s important to provide accurate and precise information. It’s not enough to blame the failure on ‘contamination’.
One of our clients told us a story about what happened to them when they returned to the manufacturer with a component issue. Our man wanted a warranty claim, but when he stated that the failure was caused by contamination, he was told that he couldn’t claim for a warranty on that cause.
So he decided to do his own research in his hydraulic and engineering books. His analysis proved that the failures were in fact not related to oil cleanliness or condition. So he took this information back to the manufacturer, from whom he received a verbal agreement with his scientific findings. But he still didn’t qualify for a warranty.
Although the manufacturer of the component agreed with his investigation into what had caused the breakdown, they were quick to state that it was actually an issue with the machine hydraulic circuit design that had caused this issue.
It was at this point that our client started to get quite miffed with the manufacturer. What annoyed him was that they were very keen to turn down the warranty but they were not making any strides towards giving a proper analysis of what had gone wrong with the component. It was only when our client did his own research that he found out what had gone wrong after many more of the components had failed. It cost him a lot of money.
The bottom line is that component end users should be given better information from manufacturers when there is a failure. If they were, then they would be saving themselves a lot of time and trouble and the manufacturers would gain a better reputation in the industry. It would be a step up in customer service. It would also save hydraulic circuit owners a fair whack every year too.
When you ask for a warranty to be honoured, we recommend that you go out of your way to provide as much info as possible, and there will be less chance that the manufacturer can back out of their promise.
Maybe we are being idealists in our ramblings about what could or should be happening in they hydraulics industry. Because we are a small company we go out of our way to help our clients. If they have an issue, we work with them to resolve it. If every manufacturer, big and small, operated in this way – hydraulic engineers would be more than satisfied in our opinion. Don’t you agree?