18 hours of downtime for the company last night .

Janderso said:
I had a mechanic working for us years ago, it got to the point we couldn’t trust him to perform an oil change right.
We fired him.
A local dealer hired him. A couple years later he was their service manager.
Funny how things work out.
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The Military calls it " F_ _ _ up & Move up." Just like private industry, the worst ones have the knack of moving on before they can be discovered as incompetent, or someone figures the quickest & easiest way to get rid of them is to promote them. Management tends to keep the good trustworthy workers under them.
 
Referred to those guys as Teflon managers. Because all the ****E they pulled never stuck to them.
 
I can't believe you fired someone. I've never actually seen anyone get fired for incompetence. I got threatened with a write up once but that was for a clever email I sent to someone I didn't know. Another guy left a 2" gas line open, not locked out, and had been trying to light the flame. I don't even think they talked to him about it. Another guy shorted the DC bus on a live servo drive, causing a small flash which burned all the hair off his arms, and all they did to him was print him a manual for the servo drive! Another guy pulled a good 100 hp motor off a stamping press cause "it was smoking so it must be bad". Another time, a guy applied AC voltage to a dc circuit board to see why none of the LEDs were lit. All of these guys left my company for higher paying jobs as electricians. Caveat Emptor!
 
homebrewed said:
A number of years back I sent one of our mechanical vacuum pumps out for a rebuild. It took an extraordinarily long time for the rebuild, so when it came back I re-installed it ASAP. The pump was part of a $150K process etcher, and is the backing pump for a TMP (turbo-mechanical pump) -- so it was a high vacuum system, and critical for a lot of our analysis work. When I turned the system on it didn't sound right so I turned it back off, and discovered that the backing pump had PRESSURIZED the tool! The idiot who re-connected the pump motor wired it so it ran backwards.

Fortunately I caught the problem before any damage was done. But never used that rebuilding company again. I also implemented a pre-install checkout that verifies proper pump operation before it's installed in _anything_.
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My dad ran into the same problem. Sent 100 hp DC motor to Westinghouse for rebuild. Came back with leads marked in reverse from when sent. Bang! Sent motor back and bill for damages to equipment and stoppage to navigation of waterway. Very expensive and time consuming.
Pierre
 
Way back ('75) when I was an electrician because I thought I was, the old timer I worked for taught me things I never imagined. Like how to bypass a grounded coil in a 2300 volt pump motor. The mold spin motors were compound wound DC motors where we used (shunt) field weakening to intentionally over speed the motor. They weren't that big, maybe 250 HP. But when one failed during operation, an electrician was stationed along side it to keep it running till the end of the production day. Using whatever was necessary, including a fire extinguisher if needed. Swappin a mold motor during operation could block out two or three machines while the crane handled the motor. With down time in the thousands of dollars per minute, it was cheaper to trash a motor than replace it during operation. They were replaced at night and sent to a motor shop that we had been dealing with since the '40s. Leo would rebuild whatever was needed, sometimes the motor leads were marked properly, sometimes not. The brushes were always new, as were the bearings. It essentially was a new motor, just a rough housing. When we changed the motor, the new install was always run for a few minutes without the belts. Not just the rotation, but to verify the motor was actually good. That comment "believe, but verify" struck a chord of memory, which ended up this extended text. Thanks for hearing me through.

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