Another day at the office
Mostly Cajun will post work stories from time to time. He does electrical wiring for industrial plants -- this is a lot different than the wiring you and I have in our homes. I have been building Tesla Coils and other toys since high-school and am in to this stuff. Cajun tells a good story and today's is no exception:
Back to that job thing…
I work very diligently on construction projects to make sure tht my part of the project is complete WAY ahead of schedule, and my current ongoing project was no exception. As soon as a peice of equipment was available to me, we got on it, checked out, put in the settings if necessary, and tested it. And up to the end of last week, I had been successful on this project, making sure that somebody else’s stuff was what everybdy was waiting on.
Well, about a week ago, somebody noticed that the high voltage cables to two new transformers weren’t going to fit right where they’d originally been routed. Picture a section of 15,000 volt switchgear, two circuit breakers, as a cabinet the size of a closet four feet wide and nine feet tall. It’s divided into two sections, an upper one and a lower one. Back in November I “dressed out” the lower cubicle which had previously been a spare, installing all the components and controls and stuff to get it ready to function as the feeder for a new transformer. The upper cubicle had been in service feeding its own transformer since 1980.
Here’s the problem. The cable for the new transformer came up through the floor in the back of the cubicle and went straight up to connect to copper bus bars in the rear of the upper cubicle. The plan for the new transformer was to bring its cables in the TOP of the upper cubicle and route them through it to connect in the lower cubicle. Wouldn’t have been bad, excep that the new transformer is BIG and the cable feeding it is actually nine conductors, three to each of threed cables five inches thick. Oh, it would have fit. and an usncrupulous and unsupervised ocntractor might have installed it that way and walked off the job with it working just fine. But five years down the road when it came time to get in those cubicles and clean and inspect and test those cables, an anorexic double-jointed dwarf couldn’t have gotten in there past all that stuff to work on the upper cubicle.
And the upshot:
...I’ve been in that four by four foot cubicle all day for the last three days. My hands are spasming from cranking on a screwdriver and stripping and crimping control wires. I’m well on my way to our goal of having the first new transformer ready to go on line by next Wednesday.
And because all of a sudden **MY** piece of this grand puzzle became the focus (through no fault of my own) of the project, the “critical path”, I look up from my little cushion in front of that cubicle and see all sorts of interested and concerned dignitaries.
Damn! I LOVE this job!
Heh...
Posted by DaveH at May 4, 2005 10:49 PM