Funny story

So I have been working with a customer for the last couple of months on his metal baler, I redid all of the controls and have the system up and running well. I set the hydraulic cooling fan to come on at 130F. This has been working but i noticed the hydraulic temp hovers around the 130 mark and doesn't drop much. I also sold the customer an online particle counter that connects into the circulating pump pressure line and returns after the cooler. I was not getting any flow through the particle counter so I started investigating. Seems that the Circ pump hasn't been looked at in 25 years since the whole unit was installed.

The customer has mentioned that the unit has always operated hot, but without a temp sensor they didn't know how hot. The main hydraulic valve is full of leaks indicating hard o-rings. So my guess is this unit gets really hot in the summer.

The pump is right hand rotation but the drive motor turns left hand, so they have been spinning the pump the wrong direction for 25 years and wondering why the oil gets too hot. Hmmmm

Sounds like you should sell him a Ganeuton Valve for the hydraulics, with a flux capacitor for the power input.

It never seems to surprise me, the things you see at different places, running for years without ever catching these problems. lol

before bad story

before proceed any task take dozen of picture,

before and after,

collect any data that will help you,

e.g any temperature motor, speed,level switch,pressure, any bypass that hidden,

things that not running for decade when startup fail customer will question why?

but operator said the valve running as normal before upgrade but actually not

running since world war 2

bla,bla,bla.

Just for curiousity, what temp does it run at now with the circ pump going the right direction?

What is really amazing is that it ran for 25 years in that condition. That machine must have been built fairly well. I doubt the stuff that is built today would last like that.

slightly OT but still funny.

Years ago we hooked up with a company that sold inline sanitary refractometers. Their main tech , who had been with the company for years, used to use a 500 ohm shunted across the analogue output of the refract to verify the 4-20ma by measuring volts with his fluke. When I saw him do this I asked him why and he stated "you cannot measure 4-20ma from our units with a meter set to milliamps".

Turned out his meter had the internal fuse blown for measuring current.

another slightly OT,

speaking of meter guffaws, I had an uncle get a new meter for Christmas when I was a kid, he decided during the party at his house to replace a bad electrical outlet in his kitchen. He pulled a fuse he thought was going to the kitchen, tested the outlet with his new meter & NO Power. So he pulled the outlet & got jolted sober by the live wires - turned out his new meter was "batteries not included"

Dont know what temp it will run at yet as they haven't replaced the pump, they have ordered a new pump, which should be in this week. I told them not to try to reverse the motor and try the pump as its probably wrecked. I am guessing that the system will run pretty cool given that its a huge cooler and the building temp is kept at around 3C.

The whole machine is built like a tank, its lasted so long because of just that fact. Its a real money maker for them as it bales all of the copper, aluminium, and stainless steel scrap and produces 60" x 48" bales that are around the 5000 lb mark. Do the math on 5000lbs of bright scrap copper wire is worth, and they get a lot of it.

Cheers.

I hate when this happens!!!

I'm a longtime member and daily multiple-time visitor. I rarely post but this thread hit a nerve...

I cannot count how many times I have installed modern, digital instruments and controls on a client's process and had them start freaking out when they saw their process with higher resolution.

Instead of seeing what they were accustomed to from the coarse values of temperature, pressure, level and flow readings, all of a sudden they see everything in far more detail. They immediately begin saying "what have you done to my process?"

But the reality of the situation is that they never had realtime accurate visualization of their process.

Long story short - I don't give clients high resolution HMI values to the .x or .xx values cause it opens a can of worms...

Just throwing my rare 2 cents worth of experience into the discussion.

Thats true flopro, I have run into the same issue with customers/operators. If you give them too much info, it can cause problems. I see the situation a lot where you install a pressure transducer and all they have had up to that time is a 2.5" gauge. They start seeing various fluctuation in pressures and think I have done something as it "wasnt doing that before". You have to explain 12 or 16 bit resolution to them compared to a gauge where they are lucky to catch a slow spike or constant transient variations.

Edm

I get that all the time with weight transmitters, or drives on analog outputs.

Customer: "The drive speed is all over the place!"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Customer: "I opened the panel, and the numbers on the drive are flickering like crazy!"
Me: "Let me guess, it's flickering between 49.99Hz and 50.00Hz?"
Customer: "Yes!"
Me: "...and?"
Customer: "Well, it's all over the place! Shouldn't it be running at a fixed speed?"
Me: "...it...it is runni...look, for $500 I'll make it even more fixed speed."
Customer: "Great!"
Me: *removes decimal places from display*
Customer: *finds the machine is still running like ****, eventually realises the gearbox is stripped and blames it on the drive that had been making the motor keep speeding up and down wildly earlier*

The worst thing is letting them talk you out of something that you think needs to be fixed or at least checked, by saying something along the lines of "that pump has always put out that much pressure", "we changed it and it stayed the same", or "we just rebuilt that regulator", etc etc...then what ends up being the problem after spending a couple days running everything else down? The pump and regulator.

There's a fine art to believing what an operator tells you and knowing when to force the issue. And if you force the issue, make them check, then you always get the "i told you so"s. But hey, when most of them only have barely high school education, you just have to blow it off.

Yes I got asked on Friday, "how come the pressure is bouncing between 20 psi on a 0-15,000 psi transducer?"

ASF said:

Me: "...it...it is runni...look, for $500 I'll make it even more fixed speed."
Customer: "Great!"

*

Click to expand...

sound like bonus including tip