ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Maintenance Electricians

I started out as an Electrician in the USN, and have worked as a Maintenance Eelctrician, Industrial Electrician ever since. I am now the Senior PLC Technician in a place that makes playing cards.........
When I was 18 I couldn't spell technician, Now I r one......

I'm the one-man electrical/electronics department for a coastal/ocean engineering research laboratory. Our main facility is a high-speed linear towing tank used for scale model ship testing. Essentially the marine equivalent of a wind tunnel. I take care of facility maintenance/upgrades, as well as design/manufacture of new instruments and equipment for specialized tests. I also help install/maintain a number of remote instrumentation sites up and down the NJ shore and around NY harbor.

Any given week could have me working on everything from large servohydraulic control systems to installing tiny strain gages in prototype load cells.

I once did a stint (one of many) as a Maintenance Tech for a newspaper printing company.
The hours were totally un-sociable, the equipment looked like it was resurrected from the tomb of Tutenkahmen(sp?)
15 hour shifts, no weekends, no public holidays either.
They bought a brand new machine that was made in Brazil, it cost NZ$5million, it was all PLC controlled, the "installers" installed it all wrong, I actually did read the manuals that came with it (all 6 of them), it was running backwards for a start, I have no idea who the electrician was, I was at a training course when this machine was installed.
Company wanted the thing working yesterday, it took me 3 weeks of 19 hour days to get the thing to work correctly.
It did, after it was programmed properly, PLC program was for a different model that had "optional extras"

You should have seen this place, it had American gear from the 1950's supplied via step-down transformers and the gear had BX cable as internal wiring and a 120V control circuit.

What's worse was the fact that the older gear couldn't keep up with the newer press gear.

When you have 20,000 papers flying out of a press, if something like a control fault happens in the older gear, things turn to custard in a real hurry.
It used to happen on most shifts I did there, that is why I left.
There were other issues there but I'm not willing to go into them here.

Good, clued up maintenance electricians are hard to find, the problem is they are often lumped in with clowns that think they are what they say they are, but aren't, it de-values everyone that has been trained well.

I have been told that 80-90% of maintenance electrical work is CLEANING, can anyone confirm that?, I know I did a LOT of cleaning of machinery to stop paper dust getting into bearings and so forth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun for variations of spelling