Resin

implmex said:

Hi JonesC:
Sadly, this is going to take the machine out of service for a bit while you rebuild the DI system.
The things that are at risk here are the pumps, and the water passages wherever they are restricted; so the chiller, the manifolds and the orifices in the upper and lower heads.

The first thing to do is to get the bulk of the beads out of circulation, so everything out of the tank, the hoses and the pumps.
If you got lucky and caught it early, you might get away with backflushing the chilller but you'll probably lose some performance permanently in the passages that remain blocked, so you need to judge whether you still have enough capacity left or if there's a new chiller in your future.

All of the pumps would benefit from dismantling as much as you can; obviously all the hoses need to be pulled and individually backflushed or replaced; ditto for the manifolds.

There will be valves that need to come out and be backflushed, and hoses to replace and heads to strip down: there will be a lot of disassembly so the rules around taking any complex mechanism apart will apply; and the principal one is to document everything before you take out your wrenches and screwdrivers, and document more as you go, and document more than you think you need to and resist the urge to hurry!!

OCD will be your friend for this situation, so embrace your task and take the time you need to to get it as right as you can.

Having said all this, you first need to make a value judgement whether all this is worthwhile.
If this is a relatively new machine it'll be worth it for you or a service tech to do what it takes to minimize the risk of a premature failure down the road because it'll still be cheaper to fix it than to trash it.

But if it's a beater at the end of its life anyway, you may decide to do the minimum necessary to keep it running and accept that your chiller will be less efficient, you may trash a pump sooner than you'd like, and you may block a flushing orifice at an inconvenient time and stop the job in its tracks.

Remember, shit like this happens even to machines in good condition, and well maintained, so it's not like you're embracing something radical by skimping on the fix.
Also micro slugs and other cut debris get in everywhere so if you think of a few beads of resin almost like a few micro slugs you can soothe yourself somewhat, recognizing that every wire machine out there has some sort of crap in its water system and isn't performing as it did when it was new.

Last; for the love of God, take one of the fittings off the DI resin bottle and reverse it so you can't do the same mistake again!!

Good luck with it, you have my sympathy, but be consoled at least, by the story told to me by Larry Wetmore from EDM Network when I bought my first wire from him. (I'm going by memory here from 10 years ago so forgive me Larry, if I got some of the details wrong)

Brand new machine, just installed and ready for the tech to come and commission it.
Owner comes in (or maybe it was the plant maintenance guy?) and wants to "help", so the night before he fills up the water system and then dumps a shitload of resin into the dirty water tank thinking it'll magically find its way into the DI bottle.

Tech comes in fires up the machine and sets it up: the machine runs for a few hours then barfs its guts dramatically.
A full water system rebuild was apparently the result, the tab was fifteen grand or so.

So you're not the first nor the last...small consolation I'm sure but at least you didn't do THAT!!

Cheers

Marcus
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