We were called to a very rural pumping station in Kentucky. We had to remove two motors from there for repair. When those motors were removed, there were some real issues discovered with the steel bases they were mounted on.
One was over filled with grout, and actually bedded the motor into the grout. The grout had actually flown up in between the fins on the bottom of the motor. The correction of this may be a future article, but without correction, this motor will never be able to be moved for alignment!
The point of this article is to discuss the repairs made on the other steel base. You can see in the photos, it was very rusty, flaking and just plain ugly. The customer did not like the way it looked, and asked Chris Probus if there was anything we could do to help preserve it, and make it last longer.
Our Loctite rep, Steve Young, recommended the use of a Loctite product called Extend, that is a rust converter. It is applied to the rust, and it neutralizes the rust, stopping additional deterioration, and leaves a “hard shell” of a surface, that is suitable for painting.
Being in Louisville, and trying to be price conscious for the customer, Joe Dupont from the Louisville shop, was used to clean the loose rust and then coated it with the Loctite product. It was allowed to cure, and it performed just as represented.
When the motor was installed a few days later by Adam Smith and Mike O’Conner of the MFS group, the black primer surface of the Loctite product was painted gray, to make it look clean and improve the simple aesthetic to be better than the flat black surface. You can see in the photos, we were able to preserve the base for another hundred years.
Another example of the capabilities and teamwork available at Horner. This involved MFS, Sales, Louisville and Loctite, but we provided a good solution at an affordable price for our customer.
