My Day At Work

[longam]

Just wanted to vent a bit about my screw up and what turned into a suck day at work.

I hate screwing up and rarely do, but sometimes it just happens.

So our main line oven for producing fiberglass conduit at work had a melt down on the right bank. The high temp blower that circulates the heat in the one side finally gave out after years of 800 degs F temperatures. The fan just blew apart!

I spent a few days cutting out the remains of the housing and shaft with a plasma cutter because the person that built the oven didn't know squat. They built the thing one piece at a time and everything crammed together as close as possible, so there was no way to remove the blower in the correct manner.

The replacement blower and housing arrived today and I thought that this would be a simple 4 hour install. After fitting everything and fabricating, the blower was in but I had to wait and feed the shaft in after the fact. When the shafting was in place, my help had to stand on his head to get the key stock in and tighten the set screws with a whole 4" of room on each side to work with. (did I mention it was hot as hell in the shop?) We had to use a plumbers scope to see what was going on inside, that's a first for me.

I thanked the guy for his help and said I could finish from here. I installed the bearing and shaft cooler on one side and started on the drive side. Putting the bolts in the pillow block thinking I'll be done by 5pm easily I glanced in the blower and seen the I had put the squirrel cage in backwards.

OMG my heart sank, I must have checked that 2 times before!. My boss came up to see how it was going and at that time I was packing my tools.

Well after calming down and talking with my boss, I'll be going in early Monday to take it appart and turn around the blades to point the right way.

Man that sucked....