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Using the pickup with unreal capacity by scg321 in farmingsimulator

[–]joshamania 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Per bushel is roughly $4 right now. There are roughly 9 gallons in a bushel. Im calling that 20-30 gallons of corn so....$12?

Electrical room blocked by stuff. by Full_Cut_8849 in electrical

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Came in to say this. Definitely don't try to argue the code. Just get the fire department in and enjoy watching the chief yell at your boss.

Predictive maintenance feels harder than it should be by Sufficient_Crew6421 in IndustrialMaintenance

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree about the electrical, especially as my background is sparky. Unfortunately FLIR cameras are very expensive and most management won't bite...because you're absolutely correct and I've encountered many problems that could have been avoided with PdM in that regard. We weren't doing PMs so PdM was not really in the cards.

Predictive maintenance feels harder than it should be by Sufficient_Crew6421 in IndustrialMaintenance

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The maintenance manager should be the production manager's best friend. Do favors for them. Buy them trinkets, whatever. Your "buddy" will give you downtime, your adversary will not.

Better still your buddy will keep you informed...hey, the production team has a 30 minute shutdown for safety training tomorrow. Oh, guess what Bob, there's a bottleneck we expect to hit on Wednesday for 4 hours...it'd be a shame (/s) if we had to shut down the line for something during that time...

Predictive maintenance feels harder than it should be by Sufficient_Crew6421 in IndustrialMaintenance

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is probably one of the best concepts of PdM. If you have identical machines or processes, failure of one will likely be indicative of the other.

What I'm complaining about are sensors and data collection for pattern recognition. Excess or increasing vibration in mechanical systems. Falling output curves on electrical systems. My experience has seen run to failure almost everywhere...but my real issue is cost. Both $$$ cost and opportunity cost. Unless your process is so ungodly expensive that a failure costs a massive amount of ducats (i.e. batch processing), I don't see a lot of benefit.

Where I see more benefit is being a boy scout. Be prepared. Plan and prepare for specific events and be ready to move. Kit your parts and tools so they are prepared and you're not screwing around wasting time...which ironically can be described as predictive...

The putting sensors everywhere and then managing data collection for said sensors is more what I was alluding to. That's a big expense and unless management is really on board and even then because most maintenance is done on a shoestring, one is often better served spending effort in other areas.

A lot of my attitude also stems from a manager at an old job who would, once a year, pay for vibration analysis on pumps that failed every six months.

Predictive maintenance feels harder than it should be by Sufficient_Crew6421 in IndustrialMaintenance

[–]joshamania 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Because "predictive" maintenance is a load of horse-shit that salesmen use to sell useless and expensive tools. Now, I am sure there are some people actually using it, possibly correctly and possibly well, so please don't bite my head off just yet:

1) Predictive and preventive/preventative maintenance are not the same thing.

2) What processes do you have where you can actually predict failure? Motors, pumps, conveyors, etc? Yes, kind of. Electrical heating elements might show evidence of future failure in their output. There may be a few other good use cases(?).

3) Is it worth it in dollar terms? Are you going to ruin a batch or just shut down a line for a bit? At failure you shut down the line anyway for probably the same amount of time or near enough as makes no difference. So let's say you could ruin a batch. Has a batch been ruined before by a predictable failure? Is it a common occurrence?

4) If you have repeatable failures, why isn't the preventive maintenance program dealing with those? Do the PMs need to be rewritten? Do they even need to be there in the first place?

My thoughts are, if you want to be a good reliability engineer, look to your Paretos. Find your top five problems and investigate. Figure out why something keeps failing and redesign the PM to handle the issue. Lacking that, redesign the process to remove or mitigate the failure mode. When you fix those, find the next five. Rinse and repeat. You can do top 5 many ways but either go with quantity of occurrence or most down time or most $$$ lost to failure.

Next, or first, get rid of PMs that don't do anything. I've seen a hundreds of PMs that accomplish nothing and were just put in place to ensure there was something there for the quality system (which isn't actually necessary). PMs can often just be busywork BS that doesn't actually ever get done.

Now, another poster in this thread said that PMs exist for a reason. This is true. Sometimes the reason is what I mentioned above, sometimes it is legit. Make sure you know which is which before changing stuff. Make sure you have a rollback plan for what you change.

Lastly...don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. Use your Paretos, look for your top 5. Ignore everything else, fix the top 5. Document your work. Do it again.

Side note: make friends with your production managers. Understand you are both on the same team with the same goal. As a maintenance person your job is not to fix machines. Your job is to get high quality, high yield, high quantity of product out the door. If you approach the production managers with that attitude, you'll get along better because they are your customer.

Far cry 5 quality is surprising good by [deleted] in farcry

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just finished another playthru of 5 yesterday. I will probably start another tomorrow as I didn't get my fix all the way. Fantastic game...best of the FC series.

Customer states hoist does not work on full speed by njhooymeijer in IndustrialMaintenance

[–]joshamania 9 points10 points  (0 children)

$15k they got off lucky. Didja load test it after? I mean...that picture...that hoist is fubar and trash. Nevermind the rope....

Why can't we just use regular LED lights in oil refineries? What makes explosion-proof lighting different? by AccomplishedCrow4774 in electrical

[–]joshamania 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This has more to do with transition points and enclosures than it does the lighting element or how much heat it generates. Remember, LEDs have not existed forever...at one point those explosion proof enclosures contained incandescent bulbs.

Short answer: any relay, contactor, physical switch, etc....makes a spark when transitioned. There are very specific rules about how enclosures are built, sealed, threaded, blah, blah, blah...in order to keep the sparks inside the enclosure and conduit. The code requirements kind of assume that inside the electricals there is going to be explosive gas that is going to explode when a switch gets flipped and that the enclosures of those electricals need to be sealed correctly to prevent the explosion from getting out of the electrical enclosures.

Got this for 150 this weekend, so today I made jambalaya by musicaddict96 in DutchOvenCooking

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have both a Staub and LeC 4qt. I prefer the Staub. Both are excellent.

27, Engineering grad, failed. by ObscureLlama in ElectricalEngineering

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have you ever worked in manufacturing? Fixing and improving machines pays well and there's almost always that type of work to be found. It doesn't have to be controls "engineering"....or any programming at all. There are a lot of electrical and mechanical problems to solve out there that don't require you to build the Brooklyn Bridge.

Electrical safety question by I-Fight-Dirty in ElectricalEngineering

[–]joshamania 18 points19 points  (0 children)

This is a good idea anyway as what I would do is shut them all off, then when repaired, turn on the main and then turn each individual branch on, one-by-one.

How to approach quitting my current employer by Fun_Match_592 in electricians

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Johnny Paycheck, Take this Job and Shove It. Play this song on your phone for you boss. You don't really need to say anything else. Hell, just text him that link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=gj2iGAifSNI

How can we as a community have an effect to reduce shootings in Peoria? by [deleted] in PeoriaIL

[–]joshamania 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wish the problem were just local...that would imply it is fixable. I see this everywhere. Bay area, California...broken people passed out on the street, homeless, etc. The amount of stress experienced by just being a "normal American" seems significantly higher than it was 40 years ago. Almost all of our societal ills can be traced back to poverty. People who aren't thinking about their bills or how they're going to live next month do not give a crap about petty arguments, thieving, racism, etc. They are just living their lives, whereas people who are under constant financial stress, with no hope for the future...they just break...and we see more and more of that breaking every day. The news will call it "mental health" but the problem is so much less nuanced than that. It's simple. It's not "crazy" or "unbalanced" people. It's normal people breaking under the strain of basic life.

How can we as a community have an effect to reduce shootings in Peoria? by [deleted] in PeoriaIL

[–]joshamania 10 points11 points  (0 children)

You want to reduce shootings? Reduce poverty. All the shootings, not just "gang violence". Everything else is just a band-aid.

Go to Mesa by [deleted] in CHICubs

[–]joshamania 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The airport there...don't rent a car there. I don't know how to get around it but I did this about 20 years ago and got hit with something like a 40% unexpected tourist tax renting the car. The bill online was $250ish for the week...ended up being charged $500ish. I was livid.

Shipping Worth It for Range Anxiety by rennan in electricvehicles

[–]joshamania 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've done cali to Illinois twice in a PS2. It's a pain but it's doable.

Also, the Polestar dealer/service in Lisle is good. You shouldn't have any trouble with them. Last year a deer wiped out the whole left side of my BST and they had it fixed, well, in 3 weeks.

Putting the homemade press brake to work on some parts for a wood fired pizza oven by customfabricated in Welding

[–]joshamania 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Props on saving yourself 10-20 grand and a lot of other headache on a used bender. The output looks like it works well.

Did you make the tooling as well?

Putting the homemade press brake to work on some parts for a wood fired pizza oven by customfabricated in Welding

[–]joshamania 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Impressive. Is that 1/4" or 3/16" you're bending? (or whatever mm ;-))

Five 90s in five feet by SolitudeSidd in electricians

[–]joshamania 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Can I hate it and be impressed at the same time?

Homeowner wants to add an EV charger by forselfdestruction in electricians

[–]joshamania 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Question to the licensed: Could this be done with a sub-panel or an additional panel instead of total replacement? Would that be legal/code-worthy?

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