Electrician > Electrical Engineer

[Knobhead]

If you want variety in your working day you’ll not get better than maintenance work. I’d frequently go in to work with my day planned out, or so I thought. Something goes wrong and that takes president over anything else.

Fault finding puts you in the hot seat, down time costs money. Don’t just think it will be electrical either, most faults will be due to other influences. Every fault is “electrical” until you prove otherwise, then it’s time to get your hands dirty. You may have a fitter with you but you don’t walk away, you both muck in together to get the plant running and product going out of the door.

Hydraulics, pneumatics, general fitting, you name it, you’ll end up doing it. I know NetBlindPaul’s apprenticeship started like mine, in the machine shop, so you had a good grounding in engineering. You need it to see why something isn’t working. Then you fix it.
My 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] day at the foundry I had to repair a drive shaft. Welded up the damaged key way, turned it back to size and then re-cut the keyway on the miller. The fitter didn’t know how to do it.

I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything.

Forgot to add, you need to learn the process while you’re doing nothing else. Unless you know what’s supposed to be happening how do you know what’s going wrong?

That turned in to a double edged sword, I found myself as shift production manager.

 

[Engineer54]

No, I did it in a hospital in Saudi years ago. The majority probably are industrially based because if a plant or a process goes down it could be eye wateringly expensive to have to wait for someone to turn up with the right tools and knowledge to put things right so in a situation like that it pays to have some people on the payroll but they're not just limited to industry.

What hospital did you work at, in Saudi Trev?? Around what sort of year(s) are we talking about??

 

[Engineer54]

Unfortunately, far too many of the old established successful companies that had experienced maintenance dept's have been bought out by larger companies and the accountants let loose. All these morons can see is the cost of such departments and they quickly get axed in favour of contracts with private companies. So all the familiarity and knowledge gained over many years of that plant etc, is completely lost!! Contractors that come in to fault find breakdowns, through no fault of their own can cause more problems, than what could have been the initial simple fault. Eventually the plants become too expensive to run and the processes transfered to another location or even another country.


Instead of axing the maintenance depts they should have got rid of the excess amount of accountants and office auxillary staff they had on their books!!

 

[trev]

What hospital did you work at, in Saudi Trev?? Around what sort of year(s) are we talking about??

AbdulAziz in Riyadh in the 90s mate then got shifted around a few. I wrapped it in because I was missing too much of the kids growing up

 

[Engineer54]

So you must know of the King Fahd Medical City (KFMC) Project in Riyadh then, all 1600 beds of it... lol!! Bloody thing was mothballed for years after it was completed. The hospital laundry was designed to cater for all the MOH hospitals in the Riyadh region.

 

[Knobhead]

As a maintenance guy you are a 2nd class citizen until things go wrong, then all of a sudden you’re a demigod. That lasts as long as the breakdown. Once the plant is up and running you’re dumped back in the gutter.