Rick Rowlands
Titanium
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2005
- Location
- Youngstown, Ohio
Well I screwed up, big time! Saturday was the first heat and everything was going well and the metal was melting fine until we seemed to lose power. What I didn't know at the time but I was burning up the generator windings beause of insufficient cooling. The genset is water cooled and the temporary cooling arrangement I had set up wasn't handling the job.
We went to troubleshoot the problems yesterday and after ruling out the field rectifier I tried to get a voltage reading off the generator. It should have been around 400 volts but the most I'm getting out is 130 with practically no amps.
Fortunately there is another generator that I can borrow to replace the burned up one. I'll find out what I have to change to get it to fit into my system today and possibly have it moved to the foundry later this week.
However I am going to be putting in a proper cooling system so that I don't encounter this problem again. I'm going to head to Cleveland today to look for a cooling tower and when I get back I'm going to start construction of a proper closed type cooling system. Fortunately I found a three ring binder with cooling system specifications and designs with some other documents I obtained from a former foundry. This system calls for ethylene glycol as antifreeze. (This answers the question I had a while back about what to use in my cooling system).
I'm so pissed off about this. I was rushing to get things running and I just didn't put any time into designing a cooling system. So instead of melting metal today I'm back to square one redoing much of the work I've already done. Its quite an expensive learning curve to be sure.
Hopefully by this weekend I'll be able to give this another try. If anyone has a larger water cooing tower or huge radiator or an air seperator that you're willing to sell let me know. I think I found a unit at HGR but until I get up and look at it I don't know if it will work.
We went to troubleshoot the problems yesterday and after ruling out the field rectifier I tried to get a voltage reading off the generator. It should have been around 400 volts but the most I'm getting out is 130 with practically no amps.
Fortunately there is another generator that I can borrow to replace the burned up one. I'll find out what I have to change to get it to fit into my system today and possibly have it moved to the foundry later this week.
However I am going to be putting in a proper cooling system so that I don't encounter this problem again. I'm going to head to Cleveland today to look for a cooling tower and when I get back I'm going to start construction of a proper closed type cooling system. Fortunately I found a three ring binder with cooling system specifications and designs with some other documents I obtained from a former foundry. This system calls for ethylene glycol as antifreeze. (This answers the question I had a while back about what to use in my cooling system).
I'm so pissed off about this. I was rushing to get things running and I just didn't put any time into designing a cooling system. So instead of melting metal today I'm back to square one redoing much of the work I've already done. Its quite an expensive learning curve to be sure.
Hopefully by this weekend I'll be able to give this another try. If anyone has a larger water cooing tower or huge radiator or an air seperator that you're willing to sell let me know. I think I found a unit at HGR but until I get up and look at it I don't know if it will work.