Well, we've all sat around in this forum & condemned the really poor work of all those jackleg electricians. Let's hear about the best job you ever did. it can be from any point of view from making a lot of money to how good it looked.

My personal best was 19,000 square feet of office/test facility for Mountaineer Gas in Charleston, WV. Job came in on time, on budget (my budget) & had a zero item punch list. The engineer from the gas company said "I tried hard to find something wrong, but I couldn't." To top it all off, the general contractor paid me on time.

Tom

good idea Tom !

a service call.,,,midnight......

old MDP 480 3 ph down, approx size 8' high 6' wide 2' deep, many fusible disco's. this served a pasta factory, many 50HP motors that pumped anahydrous in the same room..

freezers as large as a 4 car garage full of product down, head maint man's head spinning, vice prez on the ph every 5 min for an update, anahyd amonia starting to leak into the MDP area as i was tearing it apart.

i found the flash-over point ,motor spikes probably jumped the bad connection , our eyes were watering from the amonia by then .

Sometimes your a hero or a zero, no inbettween..........

I've been getting "pig pasta" ever since

166,000 sq.ft. light manufacturing building. 368 400W MH light fixtures, 12,000 ft. 3/4 EMT, 16,000 ft. 1/2" EMT, 4500' 12-3 SOOW cord(pendants)150 miles #12 & #10 THHN, 6000' 500 MCM, 400 tons 480V A/C, 8 dry transformers(120/240 & 208/120)all done by 3 of us- ahead of schedule!

At a local Drive-In Restaurant..(remember those?)
Rebuilt 6 outdoor menu signs and ran new feeder to all signs and outline lighting... (started out as a "bulb change"...there were no ballasts in two of the signs and all of them had atrocious wiring...)
Rewired a Fryer (with 190ºC wire) and "repaired" the on/off switch (rotary type with points, which one side had failed to make contact...)
Replaced Switches for Exhaust Fan and Hood Lights, tightened up all three hood lights, a "completely dismantle to repair ordeal..."
Tightened up ceiling fan and replaced socket and globe, again it had to be dismantled first...
Replaced 250V A/C Receptacle.
Replaced 125V A/C Receptacle.
Replaced blacklight bulb and switch in bug zapper...
Tightened cord connector in marquis sign (not as easy as it sounded, had to dismantle almost the entire thing in this one too!)...
Didn't have to order a single part and fixed everything on the customer's list.

If I actually accomplish everything I have scheduled for the next two weeks I'll post the results and declare a miracle. Rough-in a 2600 sq ft house and wire a service and feeders for a music festival... Yes the nightmare came true and they both occurred in the same two week period... I was afraid of that.





[This message has been edited by sparky66wv (edited 07-21-2001).]

New 3 phase 600 amp 208/120 service in an old brown-stone tv studio building, parallel feed to a beautiful 600 amp I line breaker panel 6' high by 4' wide. Stepped up to 480V by using transformers backwards for elevator and HVAC !. Put in many sub panels.
Wired elevator shaft, elevator control panel, hall switches and totally rewired old car. (Yes it works!)Learned all about knob & tube wiring, HAHAHA (:
Built 2 TV lighting grids (wish I new more at the time). And installed new digital phone system.

As an informed and very interested DIY'er, I have been fascinated with the photos and posts placed in the forums here...it seems that basic common sense is sometimes a requirement that can be set aside for the sake of a few $. I have just been completing a rewire of a 100 year old brick house, and discovered five distinct generations of elec. renos-six oct. junction boxes in an unfinished basement with KT,, some old romex with paper filler, #12 UF, BX (Armored cable), and some new NMD90 sprouting octopus-like from each J-box.(!) (Made the job of tracing the circuits quite easy...)The house had 8 branch circuits originally, including elec. dryer and range (!)It now has 20.Incidentally, I have the common sense to leave the SE and panel install to the pros.(As is usually required.) Thought you might like to know.

Has to be my last christmas shutdown project, when I still worked for the largest elec. contractor in the U.S., I ran an inhouse account at a near by smiconductor plant.
Had to replace old buss from detached u.p.s. bldng.whith 36" cbl. tray. Cbl. tray was 360' run, ranging from 15' above ground, to 40' above ground were it went into the plant,& held 10 armored cbls., each one w/4-750mcm & 3#4's. Cbl. was 12lbs per foot, making each spool about 5000lbs.
Set 2 new 5000a $gear at each end w/tie brkr.

Had a 18hr window (christmas day) to coordinate 27 men, do all the terminations & switch over to get plant back into production before Dec.26.

Everything went unbelievably well, switched over to new feeds, flipped tie brkrs (no explotions, allways kinda nervouse testing that two power source closed tie brkr. theory). Rapped up a $550,000.00 job, no one got hurt,& no production lost.

I would like to add this was only made possible by the best group of dedicated electritions a superintendant could ever ask for, I GIVE ALL THE CREDIT TO THEM.

In '76, I rehabilitated an amusement park that had been shut down for 4 yrs.
There were tigers, giraffes, bears, etc. on site. We even used an elephant to tug some wire. I worked with the movie set folks and special effects guys building stages for the shows. Hot summer afternoons were spent repairing underwater lighting (hundreds of PAR56 in the old dolphin pools), pulling them out while wearing an air mask in the crystal clear water. The whole park was just full of pretty girls.

I've done lots of work since, some that went more smoothly, almost all making better money than this one did, but I've never had more fun than I did on this job.

Ahhh...

You've done some "Best Boy" work I see!

Wouldn't Electure have been the Gaffer? Or maybe from his talk of fun, he was the Best Boy and his Gaffer had to do all the work.

Is the elephant for hire?

I see, so a Best Boy is the Gaffer's helper...

I'll get all this straight by the time I'm on my deathbed...

If anything, I would have been the Worst Boy Gaffer, I was usually that*%^$Electrician.
I had a couple of helpers, could have p o s s i b l y been a Journeyman(but considered myself as one, of course).
It really was wonderful. That elephant broke loose an aluminum burnout that 2 service trucks and a skiploader couldn't. (Real 4 wheel drive). Put 120V to flashbulbs in big pans of black powder. What fun!
Returning guaranteed vandal resistant fixtures...from the Bear Cages!
Really worked my a** off.

Wow! What a great story!

Being just up the road from the legend of John Henry in Talcott, WV, I can really appreciate stories where muscle out-performs machine.

Any more cool stuff like that?

Sparky66,
If the elephant handler had been traveling with circuses, using the elephant for "manual" labor would have been nothing new. For set up and tear down of tents the elephants used to be used as work animals. I don't know if that is SPCA legal nowadays. Like you, I like to see animals do useful work if they are not abused. Like cow dogs, cutting horses and sheep dogs. The only useful work I can think of for a cat is mousing and that is no fun to watch. Sorry for continuing so far off the thread topic.

All my jobs looked good. None were much more profitable than normal or ran much better or worse than normal. I did sell $500 worth of scrap copper on a $2000 service change once. A high school was removing the pole lights at a ballfield they never used at night. The building that served as storage and concession needed a new 200 amp service because it was fed from a sub panel from one of the two 400 amp single phase 240 volt fused disconnects that fed the lights. A crane company laid the poles with the disconnects and service risers on the ground. The people getting the poles removed the disconnects and conduit from the poles. The service conduit, conductors and disconnects were still all together. I took my 11.5 hp concrete cutting saw and cut the 70 feet long conduits, copper and all, in 6 ft pieces, pulled the wire out, stripped it (1000 kcmil and old easy to strip rubber insulation)and went straight to the scrap yard. I still have the 400 amp single phase disconnects.