| I'm a wire operator! |
| Hydro Quebec ordered a power supply for Fusion research from ETM. Ron Cohen headed up the project. Fresh out of school, he did what he was told. His system materialized containing architectural defects. Ron was stuck holding the bag. Soon he started discovering the schematic he had followed so obediently, didn't make sense. Big things couldn't possibly work. One minute there is a ribbon cable going from point A to point B; The next minute the cable can't go there anymore. This as Ron discovers he needs 75KV isolation there. Ron had no confidence he could do any of it right. It appeared our top talent got off easy by foisting all responsibility on him. Then out of the blue, Ron got the worst form of surprise: a pop-quiz style customer acceptance test. There was blasting. It was bad. Ron actually blew floor material into a 30' ceiling. One by one, our senior engineers each took a shot at troubleshooting/redesign. I knew they were desperate when the last of them specified using all-steel chassis, in place of the original aluminum--for magnetic shielding. That failed and Ron found himself abandoned again. A week before customer-acceptance-test number-two, ETM's founder Chuck Hayse directed me to help Ron. So Ron and I staged a shakedown/repair marathon. At one point I counted 20ea. 30" bays, chock-full of gear, connected together like a spider web. We manicured circuitry to beating specifications, line by line, around the clock. Ron's biggest sticking point was spurious firing on his overcurrent fault (hence, the shielding). I put a storage scope on the overcurrent sense resistor and saw a huge spike. To my surprise, nobody had even taken this seemingly obvious first step. But that first step was a doosie. I had to float a storage-scope at 60KV to do it. It revealed that the tripping resulted when capacitance of system-interconnect coax- cables drew charging current, with application of high voltage. Harvey Dain's nulling circuit came to the rescue again, this time in three places. When we got the system accepted, we just about dropped of exhaustion. Our trophy was hard earned but well worth the sacrifices we made. After all, we did succesfully operate--the wire--not just once--but in six places at once! It took a year but our firm beat that scourge. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. |
| Do I hand out cigars for this? |