I can just imagine all the money being blown in terms of blown motors, time spent trying to "fix" this, and all the downtime costs caused by the inability to use the affected furnaces.

When I used to work for Intel, they had a rule of sorts that said "Copy exactly" a successful production facility. We had semiconductor integrated circuit (chip) fabrication facilities and once we had a successful and reasonably efficient operation we wanted to duplicate exactly that facility and not try to improve it. Or you'd risk it not working and thus not being able to make and ship more of a popular product before the competition hits the market with something better yet. We wanted to be able to sell more stuff and make more money [Linked Image]

Seems this iron foundry ought to just "copy exactly" the working "one pump one furnace" systems and forget about using bigger motors. But management there would have to realize that nobody really understands what the trouble is. Even if it costs more than yet another bigger motor, it should get them running reliabily.

[This message has been edited by wa2ise (edited 07-04-2006).]