Did you know this? It's an interesting fact, though I may not get all of the terms quite right.
If you have, say, a big old transportable hoist, and you need to get a new cable put on it in a hurry, a hurry so bad the job gets done after hours, on overtime-plus, and the crew doing the work is, well, in a hurry to clock out and go home, they might -- might, I say -- spool the new cable on a little hastily and leave finishing the ends to the new guys. Now if -- if -- they were not careful about maintaining proper tension when they did their part, you could, just possibly, end up with multiple layers of loosely packed, jumbled cable wrapped on the drum.
And if the end-user started small, with only a little cable paid out and light loads, and worked their way up to longer lengths and heavier loads, there is a tiny little chance they might find the load jumping and the cable slipping and catching and slipping again.
If that happened, the only real fix is to gather all hands, pay out all (or nearly all) of the cable and respool it, with due care and attention to how tight it is and how it lays down on the drum, a process that takes a lot of space and a lot of time.
One of the hardest lessons in industry: There's always time to do it right the second time around. I heard that from a toolmaker when I was pressing him to hurry up on a part I needed modified.
ReplyDeleteI once installed a refurbed 150mt crane on a ship. The proper machine to install the 3000m of cable was unavailable and would have delayed delivery for weeks. So we gently paid on the cable as well as we could and then as part of the delivery trials drove the boat to 10000 ft of water, not easy to find in the gulf of Mexico, and put a weight basket on the hook and dropped the cable. We let it unspool and untwist itself for a day then reeled it up at a very slow rate that ate up another half day or so.
ReplyDeleteBig cable is nothing to play with. Given all the other specialists in the 30 or so people on board and the fact that it was a holiday week I can't imagine what that cost.
done right now - or done right???
ReplyDeleteAnd did we learn any interesting new technical terms for the guys who did it wrong the first time?
ReplyDeleteEducated Savage, or as I've heard from more than one Master Chief in the Naval Aviation Community: "It's amazing that the same guy that won't give you time to do it the first time will always give you time to do it over."
ReplyDeleteIt must be something they teach them in Master Chief School.