OT: Hound dog problem management.

Navy story - radar tech rep demonstrated the hazard of radar by putting a hot dog on a long stick and placing it in front of the antenna.

Dan Bentler

We have some machines that have an automotive type fuse in the DC power supply.
One day, our heroes had a short circuit. They would unplug a device, then replace the fuse, turn on the power and wait for the fuse to blow. By the time my coworker happened to stop by, they had a pile of fuses and still had not found the problem.
My coworker felt some pity and troubleshot the problem with a meter.

dYoast said:

We have some machines that have an automotive type fuse in the DC power supply.
One day, our heroes had a short circuit. They would unplug a device, then replace the fuse, turn on the power and wait for the fuse to blow. By the time my coworker happened to stop by, they had a pile of fuses and still had not found the problem.
My coworker felt some pity and troubleshot the problem with a meter.

Click to expand...

I remember something similar... except it was on a 3-phase power feed to a machine. The machine kept blowing one fuse. The night shift guy couldn't figure out the problem, so replaced the fuses with pieces of copper pipe.

The previous company I worked for had a shop with fairly high ceilings. It was leased from a local guy who lived in Costa Rica and came back to the States once a year to check up on things and visit his relatives.

The shop was very dark and everyone always complained about not having enough light. Finally one of the ancient lights went out and I went up to look at it. The building owner had went the cheap route and bought a bunch of surplus lighting that was 277V. The shop was ran off of 230V. Problem found!

I did due diligence and priced a replacement ballast and a new low bay fixture. The fixture was $10 more than a ballast. So what do they want to do? Replace the ballast. I managed to talk them out of it and got a new fixture.

Once I got the new fixture installed, I did a cost comparison on the old fixtures vs replacements. The lights would pay for themselves in energy saved in 6 weeks. Again, they didn't want to spend the money. Later that day the General Manager came out to the shop and squinted when he stepped under the new light, took a look at the machine we were building, noticed that he could see all of the paint runs and ordered me to go get more lights and replace all of them the next day.

The shop guys were happy to finally have enough light to see by. Quality and production went way up. People just don't realize how a dark gloomy place affects production.

I knew a guy who wired up a "dummy" timer in a panel for a tire ply converting machine. He told the PITA operator that it would control the vacuum level of a transfer head, and he should use it instead of changing timer and speed presets in the panelview whenever he was having transfer problems.

The operator bought the story and quit dickering with settings that caused maintenance grief.

Dwayne showed me his work one day, and the poor guy on the machine, when asked, said the new knob is working just fine. I got the puzzled look on my face wondering how Dwayne's new timer was affecting the vacuum of a motor starter controlled centrifugal blower.

He grinned and popped off the panduit cover revealing that there was only a power and neutral wire making the LED light on the timer...

It seems that the root cause of the trouble was that at the end of a roll of unconverted stock, the stuff would be tackier, and by the time the operator would get things adjusted, the roll would run out, and he'd have to put it all back.

Now, he just fiddled with a harmless knob instead of exploring and experimenting in the panelview.

That's good hound dog mgmt.
Paul

My story concerns "Dewey". It was deweys job to unload pallets from trucks and deal with customer returns.
Because of this he had to answer the phone, to the girls in the office.
Dewey said "I cannot hear the phone" so we fitted a beacon wich flashed when the phone rang.
Dewey said " I cannot see the lamp" so we fitted an extension bell.
Dewey said "The bell is too quiet" so wwe fitted a claxon (Which would wake the dead).
The local police complained that the claxon was too noisy so the manager shoved a plastic coffee cup into the claxon.

Dewey still did not answer the phone!!

We had a relatively simple machine that was about 20 years old. The single twist-release emergency stop button was hardwired and releasing it would automatically reset the e-stop circuit. The operator would then restart the motor with the motor start button.

A supervisor noticed one day that there wasn't a reset button on the machine but other machines (different machines with different safety requirements) had estop reset buttons. Bubba explained it to him but after being hounded about it by the super for a couple of months he put an unwired button in and put a plain abiguous "reset" label on it.

The operators back then knew the button didn't do anything. Fast forward a couple of years. New operators now oblivously press the dummy reset button for all sorts of reasons, thinking its doing something.

No one in the know says anything because the super thinks it works.

While working in an aluminium milling plant, one day bubba decided that it must be a transformer issue causing a breaker to trip after he had wired up a new fluorescent light. Well he got a screw driver and started hammering off the top of the transformer like a can opener. We stopped him but not after the damage was done.

Then the same bubba couldn't figure out why the same breaker still tripped after replacing the transformer. He figured that since it wasn't the transformer that the 20A breaker was too small and went looking for a 30A. Installed it and it tripped. Decided that it still needed to be bigger so he starts asking for a 40A single pole breaker. Curiosity got the better of us so we sent out to investigate. Bubba was wiring the hot and neutral up to the same light switch.

Same bubba cost about $4000 in fuses when they let him help trouble shoot a 2500hp MCC without asking him if he knew how to check the scr's.

AHH Bubbas. You gotta love em. Most of their mothers do.

lol a better question is how many of those steel workers gave birth to multi-headed freaks for children lol

Had a secretary who kept complaining about temperature in her cubicle. We got tired of it so fastened a thermostat on the wall next to her desk. Not electrically connected but she was happy ever after.

Dan Bentler

I worked as a sound designer for a theater a few years ago. The cast was having a dance rehearsal (the dance part is important). The crazy director complained that he couldn't hear the actors sing...during the dance rehearsal, during which there was no use of wireless mics.

He wouldn't leave me alone, so I walked over to the sound board and pushed up two random faders (the PA wasn't even switched on). He smiled and said he was so happy he could hear the performers now.

Ugh...

-rpoet

leitmotif said:

Had a secretary who kept complaining about temperature in her cubicle. We got tired of it so fastened a thermostat on the wall next to her desk. Not electrically connected but she was happy ever after.

Dan Bentler

Click to expand...

Even better ... in an open office environment with at least one woman in each quadrant. All complaining ... only a single zone control ... but each with their "own thermostat". Made the maintenance personnel happy.

I used to work in the blown film industry. We had stretching equipment that worked on increasing tension in stages.

many rolls had a 10k 10 turn pot for tension adjustment and each new 8hr shift that came in said it is not running good tension is wrong. Tension was always the first adjustment even for problems clearly related to heat or resin,etc.

When i upgraded the tension controllers on this machine they worked off a pid and could only be changed by maintenance and engineering.My boss told me to make a nice coverplate for the old analog knobs and panel meters for speed display.

I left all the old equipment and in the program i just moved the pot scaled value to the display.Operators still came in everyday and adjusted the tension watched the machine a few minutes and said "now it is running good.Seems like i am the only person here that can run this thing right" i always agreed with each operator and had to hold my grin while he bathed in self pride. To the best of my knowledge they still do it today.A carefully guarded secret much like a secret society.

I can count a call every time we have a busy day by a panicking floor manager. "The machine's not working and we need you to come see what's going on!"

Forget the five techs sitting in the shop drinking coffee and shooting the ****. This is such a complex problem that the engineer is obviously needed.

After walking out to the machine, a mechanical part will clearly be flapping in the wind. The operator is frustrated because they told the manager what was wrong, but weren't listened to. The manager is still try to keep running the machine destroying product left and right and shutting down on alarm every 2-3 minutes. So I'll tell them that I need five minutes to fix it (and that they really should have called the techs first.)

The panicking manager will almost always decide to postpone the repair till the next break because they, "simply can't afford to lose the machine today."

Then at the end of the day, they have the gall to blame maintenance for not reaching their quotas.

I work in a plastic extrusion plant. We use rolls to set the sheet thickness. Once a month a bearing will fail. Sheet thickness will vary the plant manager will jump up and down call every engineer he can find because the mixing system is messed up. Everyone of us will tell him look at the roll running up and down, the sheet is going to vary.
Boss "We can't to stop the line"
Me "Do you want me to program around the bad bearing and leave the good one in?"
Boss "Than why do we still need these if you can program around them.
Maintenance "We can't change bearing that are going round and round"
Boss "Do you realize how many thousands of dollars we are loosing by making bad product?"
Maintenance "30 minutes and you can run again only $1000.00 of lost time."