Mill liner replacement optimisation

I saw a post recently recommending that mills be stopped weekly to check liner wear.

The comments were glowing.

I'd push back on that.

Stopping a mill costs you more than the downtime itself. There's the grindout period before the stop, and then the recovery time afterward — the hours it takes for a grinding and classification circuit to claw its way back to design throughput and grind size. On a busy operation, that's not a trivial number.

For an owner doing the sums, the question isn't "are my liners worn?" It's "what costs me more — replacing liners slightly early, or stopping production to find out exactly how worn they are?"

The answer is almost always: replace them early and keep the mills running.

Liner wear monitoring technology exists precisely so you don't have to stop the mill to answer that question. Use it.

It's worth asking whose interests are served by stopping production regularly to check something that monitoring technology can already tell you. The answer isn't always the owner's.

Our role as professionals is to maximise profits for the owner, not pad our resumes. Look after the owner, and the resume will look after itself.