Memories of a Royal Ordinance Factory apprentice
Part three
By John Day
After the gauge shop I went to the Electrical Section. in a way
it was fortuitous that I went off sick for a fortnight over the change, since
during that time my father was promoted from foreman of the Electrical Shop (where
I would’ve been under him) to manage the Mechanical Engineering Department- this included everything mechanical except production.
I had three, three month, sessions in
the Electrical Section; one in the Power Station; one in the DC and one on AC
work
During my stint at the Power Station my main job consisted in
spending the morning doing the rounds of all the meters - recording pressures,
temperature flows and consumptions, changing the charts and working out how the
Power Station was performing. Call usage was gauged by going down into the
hoppers and estimating the average levels. For this I had to be accompanied by
a mate in case I stood on a hidden void. The rest of the day was more or less my own. Sometimes
I would wander into the Boiler house and learn the art of throwing a shovelful
of more or less pea size coal into the hopper of a chain stoker in a nice neat jet.
I mended a CO2 recorder but I suddenly found myself busy when it
was suggested I could scrape in one of the slide valves of the Vickers Howden. Otherwise I could sit quietly in the engineers’ office at the end of the
switchboard and get on with Polytechnic homework. Life in a power station is either boring or
when something goes wrong – panic. Such a life left turbine drivers to cosset their
machines and heaven help anyone who dares to put a sweaty hands on a highly
polished handrail without insulating it with a lump of cotton waste first. During my time there somebody started one of
the three throw high-pressure pumps without checking that the stop valve was
open. The result Barimar did a fine job
in welding the two parts of the 4 inch crankshaft together again
My DC spell was under Bill Heywood although I spent a couple of
weeks on armature winding. Woolwich
never sent anything out for repair. Bill
was also responsible for the electrical test bed where motors could be tested
the power up take etc. Power was measured with a fan brake made up of a pair of
steel channels clamped round the motor shaft and carrying steel fan plates at
their ends. There were several pairs of plates of different areas and
calibration charts for them. If a motor had a short shaft this was no problem
we just cut the corner of the plate to clear the most carcass I did not bother
to adjust the calibration. The motor was bolted to the rails of the floor and
the fan spun freely in an adjacent pit. There was no thought of putting a guard
over the fan -we just kept out of the way. Mind you, the noise was a good
reminder of what was happening
Another thing we tested was a generator for a plating plant- ‘all
amps and no volts’
one might say. The load was supplied by bolting a couple of pieces of checker
plate to a lump of wood about 9 inches thick and lowering into an old cast iron
tank that happened to be outside the shop window. The plates were about a couple of feet square
and they certainly made the water boil
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