A pic (meme?) for the machinists on the board.....

[Cranky]

Yeah, that's the nice thing about working on big stuff, setup takes a long time and alot of my
projects took months to machine. Crashed Turbines had to be stripped, runouts taken, stress
relieved, welded, stress relieved again, blasted, and machined. Then new "Buckets" were installed.
Lots of "Butt Time". I learned alot and it was always fun.

Exxon didn't trust us to do much turbine work and farmed most of it out....

 

[zyzzyx]

It's not something you can do without factory training! Half of those units run at 3600 RPM, and
if something goes wrong there is alot of collateral damage! When we went on-site to grind collector
rings on the end of a generator, guys would say, "Boy, that looked easy"! But if they screwed up
the job it would cost $250k to replace them. Not to mention the down time and not making power.
That big Low Pressure Turbine in the first shot was 90 Tons, and was balanced to within 3 OZ!

 

[Cranky]

It's not something you can do without factory training! Half of those units run at 3600 RPM, and
if something goes wrong there is alot of collateral damage! When we went on-site to grind collector
rings on the end of a generator, guys would say, "Boy, that looked easy"! But if they screwed up
the job it would cost $250k to replace them. Not to mention the down time and not making power.
That big Low Pressure Turbine in the first shot was 90 Tons, and was balanced to within 3 OZ!

We had lots of turbines out at the plant and some were pretty big.....both steam and gas fired and we were trained to work on them. Why the company farmed them out was beyond me but it didn't hurt my feelings any lol. It probably was because the company top dogs thought we weren't serious enough and looked at us as low level blue collar workers that always wanted to just have fun and get drunk. Well, there was that element out there but there was plenty of us that weren't that way. Thing is, the contract companies were worse and we found lots of mistakes upon inspection when the units came back into the plant!

 

[Photon440]

It's not something you can do without factory training! Half of those units run at 3600 RPM, and
if something goes wrong there is alot of collateral damage! When we went on-site to grind collector
rings on the end of a generator, guys would say, "Boy, that looked easy"! But if they screwed up
the job it would cost $250k to replace them. Not to mention the down time and not making power.
That big Low Pressure Turbine in the first shot was 90 Tons, and was balanced to within 3 OZ!

I wonder what the balance was on this, from the Mauretania in 1906.

 

[zyzzyx]

WOW! That's one big P.O.S! I wonder who the Mfr. was? Any info?

 

[Photon440]

WOW! That's one big P.O.S! I wonder who the Mfr. was? Any info?

Almost all of the early ship turbines, this included, were built by the Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company, founded by the inventor, Charles Parsons. This was a British company on the River Tyne and still exists today as part of Siemens.