bud

Bud Bedford

The first time I dealt with Bud he got me good with that high-line low-line gag of his. And he never lets up with that full-load no-load switcheroo either. He's a regular barrel of monkeys.
   We were just kids, building power supplies and pulsers. It was a grass-roots effort. Bud made us brace up and take performance data, do remedial tweaks, and get systems working over specified ranges. His spec's were brutal too--plus and minus ten percent line (396 V to 528 V). We had shunt regulators, both wimpy and overheating. There were thermal runnaway problems on the 11 VDC heater-supply for the tube under test--we blew a $50,000 tube with our smallest supply! We had blasting in every way, shape, and form. The 30 KV oil-tanks ran away to ~50 KV routinely, punctuated by report. That wreaks havoc. Arcs bypass resistors and nothing makes sense.
    I was changing two tanks a week for a while there. It literally killed Max Hill, our transformer vendor. He tried to blame us. Bud's an old transformer winding enthusiast. He knew our practices. He did a failure analysis and concluded Max used particle board, instead of the dowels his drawing called out. And that's where they failed. Max was looking at rewinding 10 large three-phase transformers. He had been run ragged already. He died of a massive coronary. Magna Stangenese built us new ones that worked.
     Bud's spec's were not for the faint at heart-- they called for foil testing every electrode to every other one. It's about arcing a thousand amps into a 2N3055 in your heater supply. We learned effective protection methods on the double. It was humbling, to say the least. The smallest of our high voltage supplies (5 KV) didn't trip the system off when shorted. The guys were pulling big eight-foot arcs off it. We installed an overcurrent detect board for to clean that up. Foil-testing gives an indication of how "soft" power-supplies are, when arced. We arc from one supply to another through the face of Reynolds Heavy Duty Oven Wrap (.9 Mil). If it blows a hole in the foil, it's not soft enough. Litton took the bold step in that spec to prohibit use of a crowbar. It paid off, there's no spurious firing. They got the computer interface option. And the design philosophy extended fine, first to 40 KV, then to 60 KV, 1 ADC/ 16 KV, 4 ADC/60 KV, 20 APk. line-type pulser. Deliberately simple, and seemingly stripped, these units were actually gaudy and tough. Bud insisted. I came to champion those standards myself.
    Bud's skepticism is healthy and well founded. I couldn't believe the skimpy offerings some engineers deliberately foisted. They routinely got caught. Bud has the same demanding standards when it comes to information sources. I make an unfounded statement and he'll be pretending to write it down, while saying aloud "Jeff says . . ." Bud got me with that one quite a few times.

Bud likes his ground-references all tied to one isolated screw terminal. Next to it, goes the chassis ground stud. Bud's spec called out a jumper between, to be lifted for hipotting the internals of each system, with respect to ground. Our traditional ETM Beam Box and Collector Panels didn't take kindly to being severed from the distributed ground-referenced logic. I had to add three opto-isolators to meet that spec. So I asked Bud, why the fuss?
Bud said Litton used to have a power-supply construction group, with about 25 guys. It was chaos. You would have one cabinet arcing to the next one whenever a crowbar fired. To reign it in they went through, isolating all system connections from a chassis ground. Through referencing the whole quagmire at one point, and by isolating the whole quagmire from the chassis, chassis-skins become significantly less perilous. Bud said people always want to put a ring lug to the panel for varistors, spark gaps, etc. But you get surge currents going through chassis skins, hence the arcing--cabinet to cabinet. With Bud's method, no goofball can pull that stunt and get away with it. It'd never hipot.

If Bud sees open hole on a panel, he'll get right onto trying to plug it . . . . And ?there is a story behind that. It seems that one of the guys at Litton had a mishap. The guy was feeding fishwire into conduit. The wire went out the other end and into a tiny hole in the next box. It was the 4160 VAC primary power feed for the BMEWS test set. The guy's arm was split open like an overcooked hot-dog, instantly. Startled, he also fell from his perch. His back is still messed up from that. And now we plug our holes.

So I was doing my first really serious acceptance test procedure with Bud on a high profile project. The teck on the project quit and the job fell to me. It was a quad high-voltage supply system. But said to take her down to low line. At low line, three of the four HV supplies went to zero output. I'm agast. Zero? It turns out the 24V Variac-motor-control-relays hadn't the voltage to pull. I stuck in 15V coil types and we were back. But it was an eye-opener. We expect to see a power supply get weak in a brownout. But total failure, of the most brutal supplies, I didn't expect that.
If Bud hadn't told me to connect a Variac to the primary-power-terminal-block, it would have shipped that way. What would intermittent loss of collector voltage do to a linear-beam-tube? It defocusses the beam into the RF structure. Melting would be bad. There's no difference in the cost of the relays. It was another case of Bud's vigilance deprogramming the engines of destruction.

From the Bedford Files:
Induction motors work as generators to nameplate-KVA! Hook the two motor leads to an oil-type motor-run capacitor somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 microfarads per horsepower. When roughly nameplate-RPM is applied, momentarily apply 12 to 50 volts DC across the motor-capacitor combo. When the DC source is disconnected, nameplate voltage appears at the motor leads. It also does foldback current limiting (manual reset). Rotate the motor 5% faster than its theoretical synchronous speed to attain proper output frequency.

Bud headed up the injectron and BMEWS groups before retirement. (They use the dinosaur test-sets of Litton.) BMEWS tubes are the force behind Dewline RADARs.

We ate burgers at Armadillo Willies and got all sleepy. Bud once nearly fell asleep on the freeway while driving home. Those burgers were notorious.

From the Bedford Files:
Three-phase conversion made simple: Connect 220 VAC to two leads of the three phase motor. Connect the third motor lead through an oil-type motor-cap, to one of the other two motor leads. (10-20 MFD for each horsepower). For added starting-torque: Parallel-in 100-200 MFD per horsepower momentarily. Automate disconnection with N.C. contact of a relay--sensing voltage across the cap-driven motor-winding.

In the old days at Litton, Bud said if you got shocked, or if you fried a selenium rectifier, you'd be nervously glancing about, hoping nobody saw you. You'd be the laughing stock if you got caught.

Whenever all hell was breaking loose, Bud would cheer me up by saying "We've got no real big problems." He was always right.