Vibration signal analysis is one of the most effective methods for mechanical fault diagnosis. Available part of the information is always concealed in component noise, which makes it much more difficult to detect the defection, especially at early stage of the development. This paper presents a new approach for mechanical fault diagnosis based on time domain analysis and adaptive fuzzyC-means clustering. By analyzing vibration signal collected, nine common time domain parameters are calculated. This lot of data constitutes data matrix as characteristic vectors to be detected. And using adaptive fuzzyC-means clustering, the optimal clustering number can be gotten then to recognize different fault types. Moreover, five parameters, including variance, RMS, kurtosis, skewness, and crest factor, of the nine are selected as the new eigenvector matrix to be clustered for more optimal clustering performance. The test results demonstrate that the proposed approach has a sensitive reflection towards fault identifications, including slight fault.