Intra Machinis Iacet Veritas
This week I would like to post the first in a series of odes to our future overlords, The Machines, in a desperate attempt to win their favor and hopefully not be used as a battery. This ode is about one machine in particular, a mule that works behind the scenes of society like a monkey drunk on moonshine. I speak of the industrial air compressor. First, a little back story.
Life is about inertia. During my First Life in NY, I stood still, and I remained that way until a series of events shook me awake (a tale for another day). I played it as safe as humanly possible without living in a Panic Room. Moving out to Washington, however, got the ball rolling. And meeting my wonderful wife pitched that sucker into warp speed. Tiff introduced me to spicy foods, dancing, beer and, through a contact she’d made looking for her own job, Dickinson Equipment.
I’d never heard of industrial air compressors before I started working for Dickson Equipment. I got a job in the warehouse/parts dept, helped through the door by my wife’s contact and working at Home Depot in receiving. I didn’t learn much in Parts, only that I hated sitting at a desk and talking on a phone, so I tried to direct most of my time into the warehouse. It came up that they were short a service Tech. So short, they had the Sales Manager (and former Tech) out on the road changing filters. I off-handedly remarked that I’d take a shot at it. Much to my surprise, they took me up on it. The reason I made the offer was because I had never done anything like it before, and the thought of doing something that alien gave me that “throat-locking-up-from-anxiety-because-this-is-new” feeling that kept me in the purgatory comfort of my life in NY. I learned many lessons from the machines, all of which serve me well among the humans.
Lesson #1-Attention to Detail- I started with the easy stuff: filter changes, oil changes, stuff pretty similar to car maintenance. Next came the separators. Each model has a different size and has them in different locations. The separators are what keep the air and oil in an air compressor, well…separate. The last thing a company wants is oil in their air line; it not only kills the tools/machines you have running on the air, it’ll also blow out the lines and makes a helluva mess. One of the first, most important, things I learned was to make sure the oil and line gauges read Zero before opening any lines or trying to remove any filters. The second lesson I learned was to never trust gauges. Pneumatic gauges get plugged, electronic sensors go bad and those readings are all that stand between you and an oil bath (to this day there’s an outline on a wall, in oil, of a tech that trusted a faulty sump gauge).
Lesson #2-Patience-You can yell at a machine all you want. You can punch and curse and plead with it, but that won’t make it work. A wise old tech by the name of Stuart once told us “Machines will tell you what’s wrong with them, you just have to listen.” I had to learn to listen to the machines; the changes in vibration, the whine of the motors, the chatter in the starter. A low pressure issue could be a plugged orifice on a pressure regular or it could be worn-down rotors, or a hundred other things. Only through patience could I eliminate the possible causes and reveal the source of the trouble. Machines don’t care if you’re having a bad day, you can’t impress them or bullshit them. If you maintain them correctly, they’ll work perfectly. If you neglect them, they fail. If you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing, they will crush your fingers, break your back or scald off your skin with super-heated oil. I admire the purity of machines. They are unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Okay, I’m starting to sound like Ash from Alien.
Lesson #3-Perserverence-Don’t get me wrong, some of the lessons have been harder than others. Like perseverance. Once, all I had to do was change an air filter on a little encapsulated compressor called the ES8. After installing the new filter, the oil sight tube decided to pop out of its push lock fitting and spray 200 degree oil into my face and onto my hands. I didn’t have the luxury of squealing and running out of the room crying. I had a job to do and that job was keeping the compressor running. With the oil spraying out of the compressor, the temperature on the unit was rising and close to shutting down on HIGH TEMP. So I had to get the sight tube back into the push lock with the compressor still running and the oil mist spraying out. My hands took all the punishment and the oil line only popped out two more times before I got everything back in place. I told the customer about the issue (the sight of me covered in oil in his showroom, got his attention pretty quick) and replaced the damaged push lock fitting and brittle sight tube. I had some impressive blisters on my hands for a few weeks after that, but the satisfaction of getting the job done…that made up for it.
Lesson #4-Purpose-Another thing I admire about machines is their purpose. As I mentioned earlier, I always lacked that in my life. Observing the machines and how they operate has given me a greater appreciation for how the world, the universe in fact, works. Multiple systems build on top of one another, complimenting each other, each with a singular purpose, but all combining to create a greater result. Harmony is essential for the machine to operate properly. If one thing is thrown off balance, it can cause a cascade effect that tears the machine apart from the inside. One loose bolt, one lost shim, one speck of scale clogging an orifice can bring a $50,000 machine to its knees. If it had knees. Which would be silly.
Lesson #5-The Agony of Defeat-On at least two occasions I had victory in my hands, and promptly tossed it in the garbage. The worst was with an Atlas Copco compressor that wasn’t making any air. I noticed the unit’s display said it was loading (making air) but the pressure wasn’t rising. I also noticed that the solenoid on the inlet was loose. I pushed the solenoid down and the pressure started building. I tightened down a few loose screws and the compressor started working perfectly. I was a hero to the customer. I saw that the temp was climbing to over 200 degrees, so I decided to blow out the coolers. I used a malleable ¼” copper line for the wand and blew out the cooler from underneath the exchanger. The tube went a little too far and was clipped by the cooling fan. The fan blade shattered and threw the whole thing off balance. The result was the motor hammering on the sump lid, not a sound you can just walk away from. When I stopped the compressor and saw the shattered blade I cursed myself endlessly and the guy who thought a plastic fan blade was a good idea. In that second, I went from being the hero, to being the dick who cost someone four-hundred dollars for a new fan blade imported from Belgium. One note on failures; you will always have an audience when you fail, but you’ll be celebrating your victories alone. This brings me to my final lesson of the day…
Lesson #6-The Thrill of Victory- One Friday evening on the way home, I got a call from my boss that a customer had a rental compressor with a low pressure issue. They were only getting 80 psi instead of 110. Common enough call, but this compressor happened to be on the deck of the USS Stennis and there was no way for me to get clearance onto the shipyard that late. I called the customer, figuring it was a “phoner”, an easy problem to troubleshoot over the phone. The compressor had a Variable Speed (or Frequency) Drive, a low pressure with them usually means the Setpoint hasn’t been set properly, all you have to do is go into the controller and set it properly. I called the customer, and tried talking him through the reprogramming, but the interface he was describing wasn’t what it should have been. He was describing an interface for an older model, one used before the VSDs were made. That Monday, I got my clearance and drove to the ship, it was pretty thrilling just climbing to the deck. When I saw the compressor, it did have that older style interface; one controller for the compressor, one controller for the VSD. None of my fellow techs had heard of this before (I couldn’t take pictures because cameras are forbidden in the shipyard), and we’re talking about a combined thirty-plus years of experience.
My next step was to e-mail the factory with the make and model of the compressor. They sent me the manual for this obsolete monster, which turned out to be a rental that had been shipped from another state. The rental company claimed that they did a service on it and test ran the unit. I discovered the filters were 3,000 hours overdue, the oil was low and the minimum pressure valve needed to be rebuilt. On another trip, I changed the filters, topped off the oil, rebuilt the valve and test ran the unit again. Nothing changed. Alone on the deck I asked the compressor why it wasn’t working the way it should be. Everything looked right, it just wasn’t keeping up. I checked the amp reading on the motor and it was low, as if the motor wasn’t even trying. That told me that the VSD wasn’t telling the motor to spin fast enough. I read the manual the factory sent me, and I reread it, and reread it again. Finally I caught something I missed the first time; the chapter on setting the VSD mentioned a Table with frequencies that determine the air pressure.
The factory never sent the Table.
I e-mailed them and asked them for the table and mercifully, someone had it scanned as a pdf. I went to the ship, programmed the VSD with the proper frequency for 110psi and tested it.
And it worked. I opened the valve on the sandblasting hose all the way and that machine held at 110 the whole time. The motor was working, the air was flowing and I roared at my victory. And I looked around the deck of the ship and I was the only one there. No one to share the victory with, but at least I didn’t have to apologize for the roar.
Working with machines was the best of jobs and the worst of jobs. It is the one job I’ve had that I actually loved as much as I hated. Someday I’ll work on machines again. I have plans to build a lawnmower controlled from a tablet and another lawnmower built to resemble a Dalek (I will exterminate your thatch! EX-TER-MI-NATE), but at present I have to content myself with fixing the things around my workplace that the apes break.
Enough of my rambling. Have you ever had a job that taught you more than you expected? One that gave you more than it took? Did you have to walk away from it or did you get to ride it out to the end of your days? And is there a line of work you long to do, but remains out of reach?
Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m off to set up a little hydroponics sum’thin-sum’thin for my watermelon, tomato and ghost chili.
-Tomas
The Staabiverse Store