Reliability and survival analysis is one of the main concerns in the industry. The main problem in reliability study is to capture the information of failure behaviour of the components or the machines. This paper investigates the failure behaviour of the cutter which is the main component of leveller machine. There are three main stages of failure behaviour; early-failure stage, constant failure stage and wear-out failure stage. The failure behaviour is fitted with two distributions, the standard Weibull distribution and the mixture Weibull distribution. Mean Square Error and -2ln(L(θ)) are used as the goodness-of-fit test. The results show that the combination shape parameters from both distributions is able to relate to the three failure stages of the cutter. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.