A Cement Plant in Ohio had a fan that is subjected to major abrasive wear due to the particulate in the atmosphere at the plant. Erosion on this fan causes this but they found it worse than normal. This was found during a short outage on a Kiln. Horner Fan and Fab and Horner Machining Services worked together to make this job a success. Heidi and Darrel worked together with their teams to pull off an amazing amount of highly skilled decisions and experienced work to make this job come together in the time frame we were given. Right down to the final balancing performed to get this job ready for delivery was orchestrated perfectly. We truly have some of the best people possible in our industry to provide this type of “next to impossible” outcomes in an accelerated time frame. When Machining Services started cutting the fans from the hubs to remove, they found the hubs surfaces were crystallized as if tremendously overheated in the past at some time. This required cutting the hubs down to see if we could salvage by finding the lower material in a non crystallized state. Fortunately for the customer, good material was deeper in the hub. This resulted in having to build the fan to meet the new diameter of the hubs and some re-engineering on the fan wheel build. About mid week it was discovered they had cracks in some 14” shafts in another critical area of the kiln and our rebuild was no longer the critical path. 36 hrs later determined by a team of inspectors it was not necessary to repair at this stage and Horner was back in the critical path on the fan to start the kiln. Fortunately work continued anyway and we were able to meet the original commitment by a day. This was all done around the clock at a record pace. Great job to everyone involved!
