Corrective maintenance involves the repair or replacement of gun components that have been identified as worn, defective, or broken. In the course of routine preventive maintenance, you will discover components that require repair. This is the ideal situation-find the casualty and repair it before it affects the operation of your gun in a firing situation. Occasionally, however, in spite of the best preventive maintenance, equipment will unexpectedly malfunction or breakdown altogether during an exercise. You must acknowledge this eventuality and be ready to deal with it when it occurs. Remember, a comprehensive preventive maintenance program will keep these occurrences to a minimum.

The more you know about how your equipment works, the better you will be at troubleshooting and repair. Experience is a great teacher, but you cannot wait until your gun breaks down in battle to find out how to repair it. This is where the knowledge and habits you developed in performing preventive maintenance really pay off. The maintenance person who has studied and understands the details of how the system works will have a head start in detecting the cause of any malfunction. This is especially true of electronic control circuit casualties. Casualty diagnosis is the heart of the corrective maintenance problem. Once the casualty has been accurately diagnosed, component replacement is normally a simple task. If you routinely experience casualties in your system during firing exercises, especially mechanical and hydraulic casualties, you need to take a serious look at your preventive maintenance habits. Constant test operation and inspection of your gun system is the only sure way to detect problems before they can get serious enough to put you out of action.

PLANNED MAINTENANCE SCHEDULES

Until now, your experience in PMS management has probably been limited to duties as a work center supervisor. As a result, you were closely involved in the day-to-day upkeep of the cycle, the quarterly, and the weekly PMS schedules of your particular work center. As an LPO, you may frequently find yourself assigned as a group supervisor. This means you will be supervising other work centers within your division or department. Consequently, you will be spending more time in the upkeep of PMS schedules. As you can see, knowing how to makeup the cycle, the quarterly, and the weekly schedule is an important aspect of a CPO's job.

Although the department head is responsible for the preparation of the cycle schedule, this duty is often delegated to the chief. Special care should be taken in the preparation of the cycle schedule because it will directly affect the long-range scheduling of PMS due to operational schedules, overhaul cycles, and availability periods.

The cycle schedule is used as the basis for the preparation of the quarterly schedule. Concurrently, the quarterly schedule is used as the basis for preparing the weekly schedule.

Because you should already be thoroughly familiar with the preparation of PMS schedules, it will not be discussed at any great length in this text. These procedures are described in detail in chapter 5 of OPNAVINST 4790.4.

Maintenance Skills

In performing any type of maintenance, a Gunner's Mate requires specific information relating to the particular equipment to be maintained and repaired. You must also possess the required skills and knowledge that apply to the maintenance of a myriad of equipment. The information needed can be found in the particular OP of the system, but skill and knowledge take many hours of dedicated training to develop and fine tune.

We can assume that you have developed those general skills by following the procedures as set forth in your personnel advancement requirements (PARs). As the LPO, you must be prepared to teach those skills to

your subordinates. Your trainees will not be too impressed if you do not know how to take an ohmmeter reading or check the clearance of a microswitch. You must learn more about the overall and continuing plan of maintenance and the responsibilities of administration, as well as the technical duties in maintenance.

Maintenance Planning

A study of the occupational standards shows that the GM1 must be able to overhaul, repair, test, adjust, and record all authorized maintenance performed. Note that nearly all the knowledge factors are required at the GM3 and GM2 level, with exception of the principles of receiver-regulators, functions of fire control, and supply procedures. You are expected to have knowledge of the basic geometric layout for drawings and sketches, to be able to prepare freehand sketches, and to read and interpret diagrams and service instructions.

The success of any planned maintenance program depends upon the cooperation you receive at the working level. Your maintenance personnel need to understand how their day-to-day work of lubrication, cleaning, and similar routine upkeep helps prevent costly and time-consuming breakdowns and the subsequent hard repair work.

The responsibility of the leading GM in administering the PMS and the MDS is described generically for PO1 in OPNAVINST 4790 (latest revision). Planning the daily maintenance work is your responsibility.