This paper concerns with preventive replacement under periodic inspections for an item (system) which is in a state of preparedness. The item is subject to wear. The item fails randomly but the failure rate depends on the accumulated wear. The item is preventively replaced if it survives a certain wear limit at periodic inspections. The foiled item is, however, replaced at periodic inspections. Given the costs for replacements and inspections, and the penalty cost of the time elapsed between failure und its detection, the optimal wear limit according to the long-run expected cost per unit time criterion is derived. It has been proved that the optimal wear limit is unique if an item has increasing weer-dependent failure rate. A numerical example for a stationary gamma wear process with Weibull distributed failure is given to show its applicability.