Preventive maintenance is the ultimate way to lengthen the lifespan of your vehicle and save you money. Proactively maintaining your vehicle significantly reduces the need for repairs, prevents unexpected breakdowns, and keeps small issues from becoming big issues. Anything from changing your engine oil to coating your frame with rust paint may be considered preventive maintenance. Here at National Fleet Management, we offer preventive maintenance services of all kinds. 

Common Preventive Maintenance Services

Lubrication

There are many components in your heavy-duty truck that need to be lubricated at all times. Some of the more significant components include your engine, your transmission, and your differentials. Less significant components include your bearings and axles. 

In a perfect world, the lubricant used to lubricate your various components would never break down. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. Lubricants break down over time and lose their ability to ease friction and heat. This breakdown is caused by the heat of your components. Take your engine and transmission as an example. Your engine produces significantly more heat than your transmission, meaning your engine oil breaks down a lot faster than your transmission fluid. 

Cooling

Although lubricants do a great job at lessening heat, they can only do so much. To compensate for this heat, every heavy-duty truck on the road has a coolant system of some sort. Trucks will typically have a radiator and liquid coolant as their primary coolant method, but others may have additional coolers like oil coolers and transmission coolers. 

Just like oil, coolant breaks down over time as well. Instead of losing its ability to lubricate like engine oil, coolant loses its ability to absorb heat. Fortunately, coolant is actually quite durable. Unlike engine oil, you can go over a year without changing your coolant. 

Tire Maintenance

If you want your tires to last as long as possible, you need to perform preventive maintenance on them as well. Instead of replacing your tires as you would with most fluids, you need to rotate them so they’re in the best position to maintain even tread wear. This will ensure they wear down appropriately, therefore saving you money in the long run. 

If you rotate your tires on a regular basis and are still seeing tread wear, we highly recommend you inspect your vehicle’s alignment. If your alignment is even a single degree off, you’ll see it in your tires.