More Power

This week was good as always at the IMCO dominion. Ran into some differentials coming to the end of their journey, so got a chance to rebuild one. A lot of maintenance this week as usual. Friday was supposed to be an early day, but around 1 o'clock, an F450 comes in with a trailer. Half of the lights on the trailer are not working, electric brakes not working, brake controller not working. Sweet early Friday huh. The plug on the trailer was filthy and my readings at some of the lights were at zero. New plug and a couple of new wires and the trailer lights are working but still no brakes. I started to check the wires running to the controller in the cab, nothing at always hot, no ground, no switch power, no way. Had a fun time locating fuse diagrams on the net. All the fuses were good. Couldn't locate any schematics so I began the chase. By 4 o'clock I was under the dash searching for clues when I found an empty plug with identical wire colors. It had a ground, a healthy 12 and a switch power that was up and down when I hit the brakes. I found my plug. Whoever wired the brake controller must of been a genius. It was a good Friday after all.

The IMCO way

 Been with IMCO for a month now and I'm enjoying everyday of it. The past couple of weeks have been a lot of electrical work. Had some horrible wire corrosion and weathering. Had a hydraulic vacuum arm not responding on a sweeper but after jiggling some wires it started working. I love how we go about fixing it though. There is no just fixing that one terminal or wire. I tore out the whole bundle, marked them all thankfully, and then after finishing sprayed any terminals down with a clear film to keep the elements out. We bought some new F350s last week so I got to put all new accessories on them. Installed new headache racks on them and ran wires from the cab aux switches to the strobes, fuel tanks and work lights. Also tore out the old trailer plugs and retrofitted some different style ones. In between all that just kept hacking away scheduled maintenance. Got a chance to take a couple of pics. One of them is of a dirty carburetor off of pipe fitter that didn't want to start, now it starts and runs. The gunk on the pad was inside the carb.The other is an actuator for a vacuum door for a sweeper. Apparently someone smashed the housing which let the elements in and killed the gears inside. Got a new one, there was no way of saving it, the motor burned up. And the last one has nothing to do with work but I went to some garage sales to look for tools and saw this tag on a tent for sale. People either need to learn how to spell or this was inappropriate for a g-sale.

Getting my feet wet

I've been having a blessed summer. Got a job with IMCO general construction. First three weeks have been exceptional. The whole idea of preventative maintenance has been set more in stone. We have 1-ton pick ups with well over 200k on them and still purring. Every dump truck, lowboy, pick up, excavator, generator, and other machinery has maintenance interval stickers on them. Like with any construction company though the equipment gets thrashed. So we get to do everything from transmission swaps to body work, to modifying vehicles for different tasks. Ran into some electrical problems, nothing too crazy but if I didn't know how to use my multimeter I would of been in the dark. Mostly bad grounds and loose connections, nothing that some good cleaning, splicing and heat shrink can't fix. I get in about 40-45 hours weekly. So I got about +-120 hours so far. (Will try to get some pics up soon, haven't been taking many though.)