High Voltage Cable Repair

Back in the manholes again! This time, we're cutting the splice out of a blown cable, so we can pull the old cable out, and a new cable in. You can see the tool positioned around the cable for the cut.
We use this hydraulic guillotine cutter to safely cut the cable.

Dobi, the foreman, stands outside the manhole and operates the cutter. This way, in the remote chance that we've got the wrong cable, no one gets injured if the cable is energized. There is no way to tell if a shielded high voltage cable is energized or not.

We're using a crane to pull the old lead cable out.

There's the fault! Only one phase shorted to ground, but the cable is useless now.

Dr. Bob is reviewing the instructions and materials to begin his splice. He and Backup are working on the 3 conductor lead to 3 single conductor splice. Toothy McToothman is their safety guy in the background. He sits at the top of the manhole and monitors air quality, keeps the generator running for lights, and would be the person to call for help should there be a problem in the manhole.

I'm doing the other end of our new cables, which join with three existing single cables. It was pretty tight quarters in there.

One of the three splices is completed (top), now I'm starting the second one. The entire process took from noon (when we had the manhole prepared and the cables trained into their final position) until 1 AM. It was an arduous 19 hours on Friday. Saturday, Dr. Bob and Backup finished their splice while I covered the cables with fire resistant tape, then did a few other odds and ends to help wrap up. I finished taping the buss around 8 PM.

Back to work

Those 4 days did, indeed, go by fast. It's 0523 and I'm getting ready for work again. I'll be playing with these high voltage lead cables for the next few days. There are 12 cables here. The bad cable is on the bottom row, third cable in. Sounds like fun, eh? Each of the big cylinders in the center is a splice. That's old-school high voltage splicing.

Christmas Day at my Sister's house

As you can see, Katie is pretty comfortable here. She wasn't much help with the gift-wrapping, though. She snores to boot.

My sister's tree was surrounded by gifts, and the entire family didn't even show up!

My cousin, Amie, (or is it Aimie?), her husband, Peter, and my Aunt Kathy. I haven't seen her in over 10 years. I'm glad she and her family came out for Christmas.

This is my brother Morgan. That's Big "M". Little "organ". *grin* he looks pretty intense. He must be trying too hard to be as cool as me.

My niece loved the leather "purse" I got her. It's called a "haversack", but to me, it's just a purse. Anyway, now she's got a place for her gift cards, so she doesn't lose them.

My other niece is wondering how to get those shiny new coins out of the wrapper, so she can buy some bubble-gum. I got her a US Mint set.

Mom just opened her gift. I got each of the women a different tea-candle-lit lantern modeled after a different type of English architecture. I really liked them, and they seemed to be well made.

We all chipped in to get Dad a snow-blower. Looks like a blizzard there, don't it?

My sister got me a Jelly Belly jellybean dispenser, and a couple pounds of jellybeans. I've got it right next to me, while I write this post. I'm gonna get fat on jellybeans, I can tell. Oh, and I'm eating cookies that my Mom made for me. I can feel the sugar high coming like a tidal wave....

4 days off! In a row, even! Woot!

The steel mill is shut down for 4 days for Christmas. The emergency cable blow-up can't proceed until we get the material we need, which won't arrive until next Wednesday, so I get 4 days off! I really needed some time off. This will be perfect. This morning, I thought about how these 4 days will feel. How fast they'll pass by. Early, it felt like I had all summer vacation, but I know it'll go fast, so I want to enjoy it as much as possible.
I got up early and did dishes, laundry, and cleaned up around the house a bit. Tina came over around 10, and we watched an episode of Firefly. Then we went to lunch at Applebee's. After lunch, I laid down on the couch for a minute, with Katie on my chest, and woke up 2 and a half hours later, late for Rick's family Christmas dinner. Al was running late too, so I didn't hold up dinner. Cheryl was just taking the beef out of the oven when I arrived.

The food was fantastic, and everyone had a great time. I really enjoy Rick's family. They are nice people who like to laugh, whether it be at each other, or themselves, or my bad jokes.
I had to get a picture of Auggie. He's grown quite a bit. He'll be taller than his mom in a few months.

Then there was the gift exchange:
Rick is opening his present, which is a gift card to the Ice House Tavern. We like to stop there once in a while. *wink*
I'm opening my gift from Rick...


...I suspect that my friend and I may be having fun at the Ice House sometime soon! I hope we don't end up in jail....

On the way home, I saw an accident happen. I was stopped at a red light, listening to a Christmas song on the radio. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but a car was coming from the right, going straight through the intersection. He was moving pretty fast, trying to get through what I suppose was a yellow light. The other car was making a left turn. I guess each driver expected the other person to stop on yellow, though when I looked at the lights, they were red. I don't know if anyone was hurt, but I heard sirens a few minutes later as I got out of my truck. It just drives me nuts that some idiot in a hurry can't slow down and obey traffic signals. Now he's going to be late anyway, and have all this trouble to boot, as well as causing trouble for the other driver.

I'm relaxing now, sipping some Talisker Scotch whiskey and eating cashew's before I call it a night.

Zoo 2

I took a few minutes at break time to see some of the animals. This 360 pound tiger was out early.

Not everything electricians do is exciting. Somedays, we just shovel gravel. I had to fill in that slot so when we put a cover on, the cover doesn't collapse under the weight of the dirt that will be on top.

Some days, we just do grounding. As important as grounding is, you'd think it would be a bit less boring. Backup hates grounding, but hey, I wasn't having much fun shoveling either. Seeing the tiger was pretty cool though! I just had to get a shot of him puffing on that butt.

Cleveland Zoo Revisited

I'm at Cleveland Zoo again. Last summer, I went out to assess the damage done to these high voltage boxes when the Fulton Avenue Bridge was demolished.

Here I'm cutting some tree roots that the back-hoe operator couldn't dig out. Big difference in the weather, eh? It was a cold, rainy, soggy, just terribly crappy day. Ah well..the customer is always right...the customer is always right...the customer is always right...
The pump ran non-stop, trying to keep the water out of the hole so we could carefully dig around the cables, and remove the troublesome roots.
After we spread 3 buckets full of gravel and laid the concrete pad down, it wasn't a bad spot to work.
My partner, Backup, helps guide the new fiberglass enclosure over to the concrete pad.
A big improvement!
Yesterday was a might chilly out, so today we built a tent to stay warm and keep the cables and equipment dry while we cleaned them and worked on grounding the system. I know, I shoulda had my hardhat on.
Backup is carefully cleaning each cable, and the male and female sections of the termination point before putting them back together. It was still cold, but we had a little heater, and the flimsy tent kept the heat inside. At least until the wind started blowing, and we had to take the tent down.

Idiot's guide to Breaker Repair (for Bill)

I know a lot of you out there are weekend Electricians, so I'd like to discuss a topic that I often get questions about. That's Breaker operation. When a Breaker is in the Oh Ef Ef position, that usually means that it was put into that position for a reason. That's not to be confused with a Breaker that has tripped, and displays the red flag. A Breaker that has tripped usually indicates an overload condition, and repeated operation of the Breaker, or changing the Breaker for a larger size could lead to this problem:
If a Breaker is in the Oh Ef Ef position, and you change it to the Oh En position, you may have the unfortunate incident of electrocuting someone. Please, PLEASE don't perform this operation without proper supervision.


However, if you find yourself in the situation of having to change a breaker from the Oh Ef Ef position, to the Oh En position, just flip it up.

Today, I froze my nuts off.

There were 4 of us working on the ore bridge today. WOP-sing, Hardy Har Har, myself, and New Guy. Damn, it was cold!! Imagine standing on a metal deck, 100 ft up, with no heat and no insulation, open to the elements. I thought I was being a sissy, warming my hands at the 100 watt light bulb, until I heard the guy on the radio say "Currently in Cleveland, we're at 15 degrees." HOLY SMOKES! No wonder I couldn't feel my toes, or fingers, or nose... As the temperature rose, up to 22, I felt like taking my jacket off. Tomorrow, with a forecast of 41 degrees, I imagine I'll be comfortable in a T-shirt.

Ok, I didn't really freeze my nuts off, they're still there; just shrunken remnants of what they used to be. Like those tiny marbles one finds in the yard once in awhile when weeding.

Cooler Days

This is the November sky I'm used to seeing here in Cleveland. The two ore bridges tower over the mountains of taconite. Rising up in the back is C-6 Blast Furnace. Yeah, it's cold.

Here, Johnny-O is in the spot I was in, when I took the pictures of Peeps and Hardy Har Har in the JLG lift. It's a small crawlspace between the main gear room below, and the motor deck above. You can see the motor feed conduits coming out of their respective pull boxes on either side of the picture. Towards the bottom are the new conduits I installed that hold the cables from the hot-rail pick-ups and go to the main switchgear.
A view from the basket of the JLG. The river isn't too far away. I had to swing out over the river while turning the rig around. It was a bit weird, thinking how cold the water would be if the rig tipped over. Sometimes, my imagination takes over....

Ahh, the pullbox. Whenever construction workers work in a hard to get to area, we feel the need to write our names there. I guess it's to let other workers know just how cool we are. Or maybe it just makes us feel cool. I don't know, but my name is all over Cleveland! All of us have nicknames too...like Jimmy 1450.

We also enjoy joking around! I'm the King of the Wooooorrrrlllllldd!

As the sun sets, the moon rises. Another day comes to an end at Mittal Steel, Cleveland Works.

Ore Bridge

I've been working at the steel mill lately. Last week, I was at the No. 4 Ore Bridge, that services C-6 Blast Furnace. We're working about 100' off the ground. Now, I'm at C-5 Blast Furnace, but I'll be going back to the ore bridge tomorrow. The ore bridge moves along tracks above piles of material, usually taconite pellets. In addition to the east-west movement of the bridge, the trolley moves north-south along tracks up high on the bridge. This allows the bridge operator to gather material from a large area and dump it into hoppers to feed the furnace.
Nice view from up here! In the foreground, the crane is raising a yellow step-ladder for the iron workers. The blue structure in the background is the ore bridge next to the one we're working on. You can also see the mountains of taconite pellets that will be smelted into pig iron in the furnace.
The ore boat unloads material used to make the iron. In this case, it's unloading limestone. The ore bridge then scoops up tons of the material with the clamshell crane, trolleys to the furnace, and drops the material in hoppers to be raised to the top of the furnace and dropped in. You may recognize this ore boat from a previous post when Peeps and I were working on the bridge lighting.

Here, Peeps, and Hardy Har Har, are under the trolley feeding the old motor cables to me. They're about 80' up in the air in a lift.

The new Katie

Katie's fur is growing back in quite well. This is last Sunday's weekly bath.She's not quite the rat-dog as when I first cut her hair, but neither is she the curly fur-ball prior to that. I kinda like her like this, lean and trim.
After her bath, Tina and I took her out for a new jacket. She needed something a little warmer for the falling temperatures, but not quite as heavy as her winter coat. This is like a hoody, but for some reason, it's got pockets in the back, instead of the front. Tina suggested that I let Katie carry her own filled poop bags.

I traded my dog for another one.

Here's my beautiful Katie.





And here's the new dog I got in trade for her.





She had a digestion problem for a few days, (everything she ate turned to poop, watery poop that stuck to her fur), and I had noticed that she'd been scratching, so I figured she needed a haircut. As I'm no beautician, and I only know how to give one type of haircut:

I cut her hair myself, and saved FORTY BUCKS!!

While I was shaving her, I could see the fleas fleeing to the still hairy parts of her. She wouldn't let me trim her face though; she kept biting the trimmer, so I used scissors.

My friends tell her not to worry, that it'll grow back. She hasn't seen herself in a mirror yet...I wonder if she'll bark!