Life as a Factory and Field Engineer

When working in Lynn Gear Engineering as a Factory and Field Engineer, which meant I was the one sent when field reps were stuck and I was sent out to solve the problem, if I could. Actually, my endeavours were very successful.

One time, I was sent to Indianapolis to examine a gear driving an exciter connected to a large central station turbo-generator. The turbo-generator had been tripped off the line and coasted to a stop. The problem was that in designing the power station they did not include a back up steam driven oil pump. After all this was where the electricity came from, and electric oil pumps were all that were needed. Unfortunately, when the station got tripped off the line, there was no electric power available in the power house, and the large steam turbine coasted to a stop with out any oil for the bearings. This caused the Babbitt in the bearings to melt, and the rotor dropped to the steel shells of the bearings, where it rolled around wiping out all the inter stage packing rings and totally damaging the shaft journals that were now spinning on on steel.

So when my boss sent me there, he said to stop in Philadelphia first to see what the problem the field engineers there were having with the tooth contact patterns on a main reduction gear they were installing on a navy destroyer under construction. They had been trying to solve this problem over the telephone with my boss for over a week.

When I got there, they met me at the airport and drove me to the shipyard. I could not go aboard the destroyer under construction because my navy security clearance had not been sent ahead, and we would have to wait until it arrived. This seemed silly to me since I had clearance to go on board nuclear submarines. Well, since it was noon we decided to go out for lunch. One of the young GE engineers working on the gear asked, "We do not have the bearing cap on the forward low speed gear bearing, do you think it makes any difference?" I replied, "We do not have to think, put a dial indicator on the shaft and we can see."

We went to lunch and when we got back my clearance had arrived, so we all went down to the ship. They had set up the dial indicator on the shaft. So I said run the turning gear in the direction to push the gear down into the lower half of the bearings and while doing this set the dial indicator to zero. Now stop the turning gear, and run it in the other direction, which would lift the gear out of its bearings. When we did this, the forward journal lifted .070" out of the bearing. Right then, I became the most useless person in the engine room, and I made my way back to their office alone.

Morgan Sibold was there, he was working on a nuclear powered merchant ship under construction. Morgan and I were old friends, and when I came in he said "Dave, they threw you in a barrel of s***, and you came up with a Gold Watch!"

So I made my way alone out to the airport and was off to Indianapolis.

Such was one incident in my life as a Factory and Field Engineer.