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Terre Haute has been busy with a lot of work from great customers. Recently a plastics recycling customer called about high vibration on a dryer auger. This customer recycles the plastic processing it into industrial resins that are used to make plastic bags. The stainless-steel auger is used to convey plastic pellets during the washing process, prior to drying and packaging. Due to high vibration the auger was pulled and sent to the Terre Haute shop for repair. Jeremy Brown, machinist, dynamically balanced the auger and sent it back the recycling facility to be put back into production. Another project that came through the shop recently was an extremely hot rush overtime job that required the guys to work through the weekend. A steel manufacturer who processes cold rolled steel had a tension reel motor on a pickle line that needed a recondition due to a breakdown.
Pickling is a metal surface treatment used to remove impurities, such as stains, inorganic contaminants, rust or scale from ferrous metals, copper, precious metals, and aluminum alloys. A solution called pickle liquor, which contains strong acids, is used to remove the surface impurities. It is commonly used to descale or clean steel in various steelmaking processes. Dennis Wardenburg, Jeff Jensen, Bob Davis, Jeremy Brown, Brad Shepherd and Gale Heiliger all worked on this job. Dennis Wardenburg explains what was done to the motor, “A call came in for an urgent breakdown stopping production. We had to disassemble, clean, and retest everything. Install new parts machine both end bells to correct size and reassemble for testing and paint. While this was going on we also had to take the blower off this unit and clean it up and test it This unit is 8 1/2 feet long and weighs about 9,600 lbs. It had to be started slowly on our test panel, by energizing with only 40 volts where it was drawing 250 amps. Pulling 670 Full load amps after it got up to speed. We slowly ramped up to 460 volts and it ran continuously on 276 amps with no load. Got this job completed ahead of schedule and returned to our customer. We’ve got a great bunch of employees that made this happen.”