The Bleeders List

Every shop already has this list. It's just stuck in somebody's head.

Ask the guy who's been there twenty years what breaks the most and what hurts when it does, and he'll rattle off the whole plant from memory. That list is the most valuable maintenance document you own — and it's nowhere. When he retires, or he's off sick the week the line goes down, it walks out the door with him.

The Bleeders List gets it out of his head and onto paper. One afternoon, one walk around the floor, and you've got every machine that can hurt somebody or stop production written down, scored, and ranked worst-first.

No login. No app. No subscription. A spreadsheet and a short guide. You open it, you walk the plant, you fill it in.

WHAT YOU GET

- Asset Register — the whole shop on paper. Every machine, where it lives, what it is, what it does. Five of these columns drop straight into the Reliability Matrix Builder later if you go that way — same headers, no re-typing.

- Bleeders Triage — score each machine on two things your gut already knows: how often it breaks (1–5) and how bad it is when it does (1–5). Multiply them. The sheet ranks the whole list and colour-bands it. Red is what's bleeding you.

- Bleed Log — write down what actually broke, how long you were down, and roughly what it cost. Three months of that and you'll know whether your gut was right — and you'll have real numbers behind the next thing you ask the boss for.

- A short field guide — how to run the whole thing in one afternoon. Four moves: walk the plant, tag everything, triage on gut, read the shortlist.

WHO IT'S FOR

The millwright, the maintenance lead, the plant manager, the one-person shop — anybody who's been meaning to "get organized" but never had a starting point that didn't cost a fortune or need a six-month software rollout. This is the starting point.

THE HONEST PART

This is gut-scoring. Two dimensions, eyeball numbers. That's the point — it's enough to stop arguing about what to fix first and just start.

When it stops being enough — when "which one's worse" needs real weighting across safety, cost, lead time, redundancy and the rest — that's the Reliability Matrix Builder. Your same asset list drops right in. And if you'd rather hand the whole thing off — the walk, the scoring session, the program built around the results and wired into a CMMS — that's the work I do at ryanmcintosh.ca.

But start here. Get the list out of somebody's head first. Everything else is downstream of that.

Pay what you want — including nothing. I'd rather you have the list than have my nine bucks. If it saves you one unplanned breakdown, throw a few dollars at the next guy who needs it.

Built by Ryan McIntosh — Red Seal millwright, thirty years on the tools. The first rung of the maintenance ladder at thelastmillwright.ca.