On Friday, November 11, 2011 12:38:29 PM Peter Blodow did opine: > Very good idea! And if you want to learn something, this guy will be the > right one to ask your questions to. He will know local regulations and > hopefuly tell you what is doing, just ask a few holes in his stomach, as > we say. > > Gene, you made some experience the hard way (no envy), which I didn't > have in just this manner, but I can remember e few instances where I > found myself on the floor, too, without knowing why I laid down... > Peter
In my case I was already laying on the hot terminals of a 240 volt, 3 phase autoformer trying to reach a small part I had dropped from fatigue as I had been about it then for about 14 hours. To get loose I had to do some fancy kicking with my legs, and my arms flew up, lacerating the backs of both hands on parts above. It was hot and I was extremely sweaty which of course just made that much better a connection. I had 2 choices, I could lay there and let it finish me, or kick to try and get loose, and I actually took a couple of seconds to think about it. I had leaned over it to see if I could retrieve a washer that was part of the shorting arrangement on the back door of the rectifier cabinet of a TF3-AL GE. Which I had to rebuild due to a driver power failure that did not take down the finals high voltage. The operator on duty didn't note it still said 7300 on the meter and was opening doors to see where the problem might be, and of course all hell broke loose when he opened the rectifier cabinet door, the undervoltage trip in the AK2-25 breaker didn't trip it, and he tried to reclose the door. We wound up replacing the finals plate transformer, 4000 lbs of it, and all the primary wire clear to the substation pole, but never did fix the holes burned in a 14 gage steel cabinet, about 4 days off the air all told including an on-site redesign of that undervoltage trip to make it dead reliable. The circuit breaker feeding the autorformer was only a 400 amp breaker. And thanks to grandfathering, the next fuse was a 15 amp in the 7200 volt feed of each phase on the substation pole. There was no entrance breaker in that building, built in about 1956, long before there was an N.E.C. manual. Serviced by 4 pieces of 750 mcm alu. That was the first time it was replaced, but they did a bad crimp and we had to replace it clear into the building when that crimp went to hell about 10 years later. Those fuses have been cleared so many times they won't clear anymore, the holders themselves are so conductive from exploded fuse wire. Last time parts caught fire & dripped into the dry grass under the pole & had to be stamped out as we never had more than about 1200 gallons of roof runoff water in the cistern. Its still hot, but only because the 509' tower still needs lights. The operator on duty at the time was in the shitter and claimed he saw the lights flicker but had no idea I was the "short circuit". It made him feel bad that he wasn't there to help. Since I outweighed that older Vietnam vet by about 100 lbs at the time, I doubt he could have helped much anyway. He was one of my charity cases, no HR dept would ever have hired him, and now gone from the big C with a month to go before he could have filed for early SS. He had brain enough to do the job and actually understood me when I talked technical, but was a physical wreck from Nam wounds, and slowly turning into an alky. I had to chew him out about drinking on the job early on, but did not have a problem again till the last year when it was obvious to all that his time was running out, and that he needed it for pain killer. He had a ball on his back near the spinal cord about the size of a grapefruit, but wouldn't go get it checked out at the local VA hospital because he was also taking care of his long time live in GF whose kidneys had failed and that was, in his mind, more important. I can be a hard ass, but I couldn't fire him as long as the logs were taken care of. I gave him 15 years of employment he likely would not have otherwise had. He had another talent too, he was a relatively busy drummer in Nashville for a while after the V.N. war, backing some of the big names at the time and could still do a damned good job on Jerry Wood's drum set, another story I might tell some time. A walk down memory lane... [overdue snip] Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> "Engineering meets art in the parking lot and things explode." -- Garry Peterson, about Survival Research Labs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
