Friday, October 6, 2017

Who would have thought that was a bad idea

I have been down here about nine years. At work, we have a few CNC grinders I run when I am not repairing them, seeing as how they are Swiss made. They may know watches, but they suck at electronics. When we brought the Kelvaria down from Chicago, it had a bad air conditioner in the electrical cabinet. We were running it with the door open to keep the electrics cool. Being a tool and die shop of high precision parts, it is temperature controlled rather well, so all was good. They didn't like that down here, as I am sure OSHA wouldn't as well, so, they ordered a new unit. The company sent the wrong one, from Switzerland, for several thousand dollars. Our genius bosses didn't want to send the unit back. Against my wishes, they made it fit, with the help of a plasma cutter. They cut a hole in the back of the cabinet and the floor of the cabinet. Nine years I have had issues with the machine. It has sucked the oil and filth from the floor under the machine and blown it directly into the Siemens drives which are located directly above the AC unit.
The workhead on the machine has been dying all week. The drive finally succumbed to the oil dripping off of it. I can't believe the electronics didn't fry years ago. The drive was alarming the machine out, but I was able to limp it along for a few days if I moved chuck by hand as I hit the start button. The initial inertia was enough to get it going. The boss finally let me look into fixing it. I told him I thought the AC unit was the root of the problem and showed him the oil soaked drives. I removed the AC unit and ran machine for a few days. Without the AC unit, ALL ALARMS I have been getting intermittently for years went away. ALL of them. The drive died altogether yesterday. I ordered a new one online and robbed one from the other Kelvaria grinder to test out. Machine is running flawlessly for the first time in nine years. Boss let me order the proper AC unit for it. He would not however let me castrate the person who butchered it years ago making life a living hell. Typical lack of logic in management, they won't let me replace the other drive cards that are dripping oil and grit. I told him the place that rebuilds them would only cost us about three grand to do the rest of the drives and the power supply. Twenty five year old machine, the drives owe us nothing. Boss says we will wait for them to die. Down time will cost us way more than what preventative repair would cost. Total lack of logic in the work place. I am glad I am closer to retirement than starting out. I sure don't like the way things work anymore. Total lack of logic.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Rich;

    Logic don't apply future maintenance concerns are...well the future...they have to keep it going as long as possible first. I dealt with that with Ford Motor Co and the robots. They would slap band-aids on it to limp it along rather than cut production.

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