One of our Horner customers had a mid 70’s Reliance Engineered Drive with an AB PLC-5, it was operating a Banbury Mixer application. The existing drive was damaged in a minor fire and was only operating on 3 out of 6 caps. Due to the damage and loss of pertinent feedback to monitor quality, our customer made the decision to replace the existing drive with a new Bardac DC drive. Bardac was chosen due to the availability of the drive which was 2 weeks out on an expedited basis. No other drive company could provide delivery inside 16-18 weeks. David Whited, Inside Sales at our Springfield location, came up with the idea to bring on Bardac Drives several months earlier. What a smart idea for our customer’s David!
Multiple site visits by Jim Delawder, Dan Sneary & Mark Tribby were scheduled to ensure the Bardac drive would fit the existing enclosure, installation team was assembled, control voltage concerns addressed, buss concerns, fuse sizing addressed, integrators concerns discussed, parts and materials ordered. Conference calls were conducted with the Bardac team, Horner team and integrators. The customer had a confined time frame for the drive changeout so the site work began on a Saturday through Tuesday to have the drive up and running production. Mark Tribby – EFS and Dan Sneary-Springfield, teamed up for the changeout. The talent level of our Horner technicians on a job like this is extraordinary. The changeout work was 90% complete by Sunday evening. Circuits were confirmed Monday morning and the communication between the AB vintage PC with the modern Bardac drive work began. Tom Wagner, Horner Drive Engineer, along with an AB integrator and experienced Bardac integrator teamed up to accomplish a challenging task.
No one on this team had performed the specific task of setting up a Bardac modern drive to communicate with an older vintage AB PLC-5 which was an existing engineered system. After some impressive work during commissioning the team started the drive, and the customer was running the mixer on the schedule we committed the project to be complete. A well-earned thank you to all who put in the long hours and effort into this project to make this a successful upgrade on a critical Banbury Mixer application for our customer.