Validate your Grease Gun

When we start talking precision lubrication, we must emphasize the word precision… Bearings are designed with a maximum re-grease quantity based on their size. If we are going to precisely re-grease bearings using a grease gun, it is essential to know how much grease is being injected with each stroke.

Grease guns are created with different outputs. Grease guns dispense as little as 0.5 grams per stroke, and as much as 4 grams per stroke.

Let's now hypothetically prepare to grease a bearing! First we are going to need to know a few things… The type of bearing, maximum re-grease quantity, ideal initial injection, and ideal subsequent injections.

With the initial injection, lubrication techs should be looking to add somewhere between 20 and 25% of the maximum re-grease quantity. This is to ensure there will be a reaction when the grease gets inside the bearing. After the initial injection, we want to inject subsequent injections with less grease.

To accurately perform this greasing task we will need to know how much grease our grease gun dispenses with each stroke.

Measuring grease output is a very simple process. Find a small scale that can measure in grams. Most postal scales today have two settings, one for Oz and one for grams. I very strongly recommend using the gram setting, as most bearings do not output a large quantity of grease. After you have your scale, place some wax paper on top and add 10 strokes of grease. Take note the number, and divide that number by 10. You now have a pretty good indication of how much grease is outputted with each stroke of the grease gun and are ready to re-grease bearings with precision.