No! I Am Not Talking About The Gary Numan Track
Although, since I have mentioned it, I can now use it as an illo that is totally justified and not clickbait at all. Art!
You see, today's Intro is another from 'Ripe's Youtube channel, and is all about hubris, pride, arrogance and rotor bearings. It is narrated by Industrial MillwRIGHT, hereafter IMRIGHT, who explained that he and his team worked on maintaining and rebuilding industrial gas and steam turbines. As you might imagine, these were whacking big pieces of kit, weighing hundreds of tons. Art!
IMRIGHT's area of specialism was in aligning the turbine and generator rotors together, in this case massing fifty tons and intended to spin at up to 3,500 revolutions per minutes. They needed tolerances of 0.001", which is one-third the thickness of a sheet of paper. To achieve this level of compliance meant operating with laser alignment tools, hydraulic jacks and shims, in a time-consuming process that typically took 12 hours to manage. Enter the Superintendent, whom I will dub the Subintendent as he possessed all the wit of a jelly doughnut and who focussed only on budget and schedule, not critical details. Then enter the villain of the piece, whom IMRIGHT dubbed 'Karen' with no sense of irony at all.
Art!
Karen was an obnoxious boastful blowhard who wanted IMRIGHT's job and openly sucked up to Subintendent, putting IMRIGHT down and claiming she could do his job much, much faster.
Never mind that IMRIGHT had been doing this job for 5 years with no failures, Subintendent made the worst decision of his professional career and ate up all Karen's 'advice'. He replaced IMRIGHT with her, quoting "She has a much faster method that she used on her last site".
This was blatantly untrue and one can only speculate that her entitlement and arrogance made her think she could do better than an operator with 5 years experience behind them. Art!
IMRIGHT was told to go torque bolts, which he did, but not before warning Karen and Subintendent about 'Thermal growth' on the rotor.
You see, a metal rotor spinning at 3,500 RPM creates a lot of heat, which causes it to expand, and this expansion has to be taken into consideration when aligning the turbine and generator rotors. You CANNOT align them perfectly when they are 'cold' (that is, at room temperature) and there are engineering manuals that give exact figures of how much offset to use; in this case the turbine rotor needs to be 0.045" lower.
You can probably guess where this is going. Both Karen and Subintendent ignored the warning, then signed off on the paperwork. Five days later the rebuild was complete and the plant was going to be started up. IMRIGHT impressed that starting up a gas turbine is a lot more involved that pressing a 'Start' button or turning a key. Art!
The bearings are flooded with oil, then a safety gearing rotates the shaft to ensure there is free movement, the ignition sequence begins and the starting motor initiates. There were no problems as the rotor hit 1,000 RPM since the machine remained fairly 'cold'. However - a word you knew was going to crop up - things changed when the rotor hit 2,500 RPM and there was an awful metallic scraping noise as the machine rocked - hence today's title - more and more violently. Smoke started pouring from the casing as alarm klaxons sounded and the plant operations staff initiated an 'Emergency trip', shutting the rotor down. Art!
It took ten minutes to come to a complete halt, by which time an enraged Plant Manager was at the turbine, wanting to know what on earth had happened, except with a lot more colourful language.
Karen, looking pale and anxious, admitted/confessed/stated <delete where applicable> that she had aligned the shafts perfectly at zero-zero deviation, causing the Plant Manager to have both kittens and conniptions. "You did not put the thermal offset in?" because of course she didn't as she had nil experience in this work. They opened up the turbine casing. Art!
That's a Babbitt bearing, and all of them in the turbine were squashed flat; the rotor itself had long gouges in it. The Plant Manager assessed the physical damage at $500,000 alone, on top of the failure to produce energy.
Karen was immediately given a brush and told to sweep the entire factory floor, which she did with a beet-red face, terminally embarrassed, until her termination came through a week later.
Subintendent, possibly thanks to family connections, was not terminated or even demoted, but was warned if he ever shirked any critical procedure, he'd be unemployed within the next five minutes.
IMRIGHT assumed his old position and helped align the rotor correctly, being left entirely alone by Subintendent.
Number Seven
In the list of Rotten Tomatoes films scoring 0%. This time it's 'Left Behind' in it's 2014 iteration, starring Nicholas Cage. Art!
Left behind, right behind, centre behind
The critics were merciless and thoroughly lambasted it, describing it as one of the most inept films ever committed to celluloid. Back when they still used celluloid. Art!
You might think that's not bad, especially as these figures are from 2014, but don't forget the 50% Rule - the studio only gets back half of the box office total, so $13.5 million and it had a budget of $16 million. Ooops.
To sum the plot up, "A small group of survivors is left behind after millions of people suddenly vanish and the world is plunged into chaos and destruction"
Nah, not impressed, not on my To Watch list.
What's In A Name?
Art!
You might call this Item 'Fields On Fire' because I'm going to return to the subject of the Ruffian oil refinery and storage depot at Tuapse on the Black Sea coast. It's very much the black sea now, covered as it is with oily residues, and the best the orcs can do is send people out to shovel it into buckets. Art!
"Tuapse 1st May'
This is the Kozaky giving the refinery a right malleting, again. This is the fourth strike on the plant and the orcs don't seem to have anything defending it, although since the strikes were at night it's possible there were defenders. At any rate, about 70% had been destroyed before this fourth strike. Art!
Courtesy 'Professor Gerdes Explains'
I can imagine the Ruffians simply giving up and not bothering to rebuild the site. That's not all. Art!
This is the Ruffian oil pumping station at Perm doing an impersonation of a volcano. There are two critical factors at play here; firstly, Perm is 1,500 kilometres from Ukraine and may have thought itself invulnerable thanks to that distance, which is now proven a rather hollow hope. Secondly, it is a vital node in the oil pumping network. Art!
Courtesy 'Jake Broe'
It doesn't matter if oil is fetching $120 per barrel if you can't export it. In fact, the amount of oil Mordorvia is exporting has fallen from 11 million Barrels Per Day to 4.69 BPD. Less than half.
Of course - obviously! - it's all going according to plan.
Another What On Earth? Moment
One of the things I miss about 'The Daily Beast' is their TEMU advertising bar, which used to promote mysterious-looking tat that was O-so-tempting to click on, in order find out what they were used for, such as the 'Golf Divot Replacing Tool'. Art!
I don't care if it has valves, transistors or integrated circuitry. What is it? What is it used for? Why is the algorithm coming up with suggestions I have less than zero interest in? Does it go in an engine? Have I ever expressed a wish to fiddle about with the dirty noisy magic metal mass 'neath the bonnet?
NO! on all counts.
Finally -
Here's another horrid photo of King Piggy, contrasting his orange face with his pink ears. Art!
