Jan. 2009 Site Generator - War Story Well... the first train wreck of 09 hit early in the calendar year.
A critical care customer reports a serious problem... off we go to the super remote solar & propane radio site. We arrive to find everything looking just peachy... but since it's a 5 hour drive we figure to check every detail and do regular maintenance anyway. Move around some cable to find a one repeater cuts in and out... oh my god, the feed line is *&^#$%@ LMR-400 from the original site owner. Out it goes and everything quiets down, life is good once again. Or so we thought... Packed up ready to leave... let's do one last generator test. Switch on to hear a really bad sounding metal on metal grinding noise... quick switched off. Let me give the short version... Genset (generator engine) starter removed to see the most of the flywheel ring gear missing. The grinding noise was the starter chipping teeth off the flywheel ring gear. Bad, very, very bad... Dark clouds form in my head while I/we try to figure out how to fix this remote mountain site cluster #...@%&. We resign ourselves to at least get the major pull-down part of the repair started, then think about how to allocate resources and dive into pulling the genset apart. Much to our surprise... we properly unbolted 10,000 items to end up with the flywheel in our hands 3 hours later. Down the mountain to the nearest, largest nearby town where we quickly relearn how nothing happens or moves fast in Hooterville. So I ask and find a local full-service machine shop and off we go. The appended version is the machine shop did a fix to the ring gear and repressed it on the flywheel while we ate a late lunch. I had a RB sandwich with fries... and Ice Tea of course. Picked up the beast (repaired flywheel) and off we went back to the site... Another 2 hours or so to reinstall the flywheel and restore the unit. Big smile as I hit the switch to hear the engine cleanly roar to life every time. Down the mountain we go... dirty, mangy and might unclean but no longer wanted men (sorry to those of you who get the AC/DC reference). Forget the decafe coffee, stocked up with 20oz French Roast (light cream), snacks, a recently renewed XM-Radio subscription and start the long drive home. Walked back in the shop door some 23 hours after we left... So, how was your day? cheers, skipp skipp025 at yahoo.com www.radiowrench.com
