| Abstract: Maintenance cost of agricultural machines accounts for about 10 to 15% of total production cost and this tends to increase as the machine gets older. To stabilized this already high cost, agricultural machinery maintenance engineers chose Preventive Maintenance (PM) strategy. However, the latter may not produce the desired results especially when machines are used under different operating context. In this paper, an assessment of the effects of PM strategy on reliability indicators (failure rate, mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR) and mechanical availability) of a rice combine harvester Mitsubishi TVR96 working under the operating context of Pacharr rice fields in The Gambia, is discussed. These reliability indicators... |
