In a message dated 7/23/05 9:30:48 AM, rrecardo@WEBTV.NET writes: << There is one and only one way to get this job done prudently, in a half hour's time rather than weeks of soaking.
Heat. >> As much as Georgie Boy hates to agree with Mr. RC, he's right on the nuts with this one. I think a lot of you fellows would be surprised to see the number of BTU's which are applied to your vans once you've dropped them off at the local Autohaus. I once was in the spread room beneath the control room of a nuclear power plant in order to perform a field change on a motor-generator set. The motor-generator had a flywheel on it which kept the M/G spinning for a while until the emergency DC generators were on line and stable, should they ever be called into service. The flywheel was perhaps two feet in diameter, about four inches thick and mounted on a taper to the outboard end of the M/G set. As with any taper mount, the millwrights were having a fit trying to pull the flywheel with the dedicated puller. They asked me if they could try a little heat and I said sure because I knew these guys weren't idiots and they had been pulling flywheels since before I was born. With that, a green engineer who was representing the vendor, Combustion Engineering, in this circle jerk stepped in and said no heat on a critical system component. He said to stop the work until he could call his boys in the design office, the same guys who had designed the useless puller. As soon as he left, one of the millwrights grabbed the nearest blue flame wrench and heated the hub of the flywheel. Budda-bing, budda-boom, in less than a minute the flywheel was off and the torch hose was coiled. When the CE engineer returned, he asked what happened. I told him that they had snugged the puller as tightly as they could and the flywheel popped off. I didn't mention the novena raised to Saint Kelvin. Georgie Boy |
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