The members of the guild arrived on Wednesday September 12th for the Golf outing at Jägare Ridge Golf Club with Hospitality at the Best Western Sherwood Hotel and Conference Centre. On September 13th Mick Brown opened the meeting with the introduction of the officers and general business along with the introduction of our new members and then began the technical presentations. The first presentation was by Chris Peitchinis & Scott Adams from Tube-Mac and presented a paper On “Servercorr goes weld less with Tube-Mac”. This presentation will be available on the website under the Technical papers section. The next presenter was Scott Howard from HY-PRO and presented a paper on “Fluid Conditioning: Water Contamination & Control”. This presentation will be available on the website under the Technical papers section. The next presenter was Ed J. Leszczynski - P.Eng from Alta Steel and presented a paper on the “PMI” initiative AT Alta Steel”. This presentation will be available on the website under the Technical papers section. Our last paper was presented by Carl March from Life Cycle Engineering is presenting a paper On “Reliability Initiatives in the Steel Industry”. This presentation will be available on the website under the Technical papers section. After the technical papers were complete, the group broke for lunch and at 1:00 left the hotel for there tour of the Alta Steel facility. After returning from our tour we joined in the conference room at 6:00 for a social hour provided by Alta Steel. Dinner was served at 7:00 and we were able to listen to Chris Jager – President of Alta Steel talk about his plant and its position in the steel industry. Friday morning the drawing the Ipod Nano was held and Daniel Rocha of Tamco was the lucky winner. We gave out the Golf outing door prizes and then had a short Business meeting to cover the web site security connections and to determine the location of the next meeting. Two locations were considered, Chaparral Virginia and Dofasco in Hamilton. The members in attendance decided to go to Chaparral Virginia in April 2008 and to Dofasco in September 2008. Next Mick Brown had everybody introduce themselves and the company they work for. The round table session began with questions from the floor at 8:30.
At the beginning of the discussion the group laid out the meeting agenda formats they would like to see at future meetings. Safety will be a technical paper for every meeting. The April meeting Mark will line up a presentation on the OSHA standards in regards to the high voltage standards. The Fall Technical meeting will cover Coherent jet Technology and will be a 4 day meeting with a tour of Dofasco, Ford motor plant and Tube Mac
A question was asked, “Is anyone using yellow jacket pipe for injector pipe? A discussion was held on different types of pipe the pros and cons of them.
Next question was on environmental issues with evacuation of the charging floor. The stratified dust makes it hard to see and breathe for the crane men. Different ideas were discussed and types of filtering systems along with off gas monitoring and pressure sensing systems. Lighting in the melt shop furnace area was discussed and it’s importance to safety and the moral of the people working in those areas. There was a direct positive influence related to a well lit area verses the dirty dark shop lights. New lighting systems are coming out to do away with mercury vapor to a new type of incandescent. Some suppliers are stating a 9% savings on light cost alone and will provide an audit and guarantee the savings.
The topic of skilled personnel retention, training and replacement was discussed. Some shops will be experiencing upwards to 10% attrition over the next 5 to 10 years and are starting to resurrect the abandoned apprentice programs in an attempt to get younger personnel that will be able to be retained. Testing the potential candidates was discussed as well as different programs. Some shops are looking at a new training program though the local universities to train the candidates not only in maintenance but also as operators. This will allow them to run and maintain there own equipment.
Does anyone have problems with the mast cylinder leaks? If all your repairs and rebuilds are done to spec then you may want to look at a complete seal redesign. Most shops that had problems were able to correct them with proper set up or they redesigned the seal assembly. Storage of the cylinder was discussed along with average life. Seal or Cylinder life ran from 5 to 10 years. Stored cylinders have to have protection from corrosion and pitting from a water glycol type fluids and different methods was discussed.
What is a typical day for a maintenance planner different shops talked about there systems and what it takes to properly gather information and plan out the jobs for implementation. Management training was pointed out to be as important as the training for the planner and supervisors. A long discussion was held on the different methodologies used in the various shops along with the problems they had to overcome and the things that worked.
How many planners do shops have per skilled people? This generated a long discussion with mixed response from the membership, from 1 per 10 to 1 per 20, with different planning methods.
What types of reheat furnaces are shops using with freezing problems? The comments were more directed to the maintenance rather than the style furnace you have.
Condition monitoring, what do you do and what do you contract out? Most shop find that it was more cost effective to contract it out than to train your personnel because of the time it takes to get them all up to speed, it maybe something that you can work towards over time. Different types of measuring equipment from Thermal scanners to vibrations monitoring systems were discussed.
Is anyone using outside contractors to work on or maintain overhead cranes? Most shops didn’t feel comfortable with using outside contractors that are not familiar with the equipment and the lack of ownership an outside contractor would have with a critical piece of equipment that has a high level of safety requirements. Along with this discussion different types of anti collision technologies were discussed with bumper designs. Laser positioning and locating technologies was discussed along with the application they were used in, ladle cars cranes and scrap cars were all applications covered.
Is everyone else having trouble with obsolete drive controls? One shop has standardized with one company Avitron which was very customer oriented and recommended them to the group.
How do the different shops deal with planning the jobs and developing a time estimate to do the job? A lot of the work force has a hard time with a planner telling them a certain job will take “x” amount of time to do. Convincing them that this is only an estimate and getting them to buy into it is a real challenge with today’s work force.
After lunch we started the discussion on CMMS Systems, who is using SAP? Scaw had 2 failed attempts, one shop is using Main Saver, and another used Ivara. But all seem to modify the systems to suit there operations. All wants to have the ability to view drawings through there CMMS system.
Door lance conversation was held in regards to maintenance and reliability.
Transformer operation performance was discussed and the consensus was the cooler you keep your transformer the longer the life will be. On the topic of spare transformer reliability it was determined the only way to know your new spare transformer is good you need to put it into operation to verify. Even with this practice it doesn’t guarantee its status as a good transformer. More discussion was held on transformer maintenance, failure analysis and storage.
Is anyone using AMI online monitoring? Some were but most do it within the system. Some shops us Dobel per insurance mandates. Arc guard was another device that helps in the transformer over current protection.
Is anyone using RTD temperature sensors on roof and sidewall panels? Discussion on RTD reliability was held. The consensus was the majority are moving away from them do to the difficulty maintaining their consistent operation.
Any one using Disc brakes on hot metal crane main hoist? No one at this meeting was with all using drum type.
Discussion on fall protection tie off point for roof changes was held and this is an issue that is in constant review.
Safety meeting topics, documentation and frequency was discussed and there were several different methods used and all were internally established.
Has anyone ever had a crane hook break at the shank? Some have had that happen on an occasion. This shop went out and inspected all there hooks after there failure and found several more with cracks and all were from the same manufacture and material heat run. The supplier of the hook is currently reviewing the heat these hooks were made from.
Safety incentives were discussed from cash drawings for those who have no accidents to other items to generate a desire to watch out for the other guy.
