Saturday night I was arriving at the barracks. Tuesday morning, back at work. Today we unpacked all our gear and started working on two Cobra phases. That phase inspection requires my shop to pull out the heating and cooling unit ("ECU"), a box that's about two feet wide, six inches long, and eighteen inches tall. It weighs about thirty pounds, and costs as much as a decent car. (Making a lightweight heater+A/C unit is a challenging engineering task.) One of the pipes these things have takes bleed air from the engines- that is, air from the bypass path, so it's not been burned, but is at high pressure and high temperature.

The plumbing to get this air from the engines to the ECU has a bunch of connections, as it passes through valves, firewalls, etc. And metal connections exposed to 400° air for a while tend to get stuck. Normally we need to whack a few places with a wrench to get it to disconnect.

One of the ones we did today came off very easily. That should have been the warning, because the same connection at the other aircraft was as bad as I've ever seen. We hadn't gotten it disconnected by the time we knocked off for the day, but we did get all the way up to a 30 lb wrench with a six-foot long cheater bar. We broke that wrench, which I feel bad about, because tools that big are expensive. We were pushing that cheater bar by lying down and pushing on it with both legs. I think it broke at about 300 lbs force exerted by me, by comparing how I felt with how it feels to do leg pressed in the gym. So let's see, we put 3600 ft-lbs on that thing and it didn't come off. Most annoying.

So it's soaking in oil overnight. In the morning, we're going to hold a blowtorch to the outer joint and ice the inner pipe to get some thermal expansion help too.

When I wasn't getting my ass kicked by a Cobra, I learned that I've got to give an egress and explosive safety lecture to all hands first thing tomorrow morning. Now, not to pat myself on the back too much, but I've been told many times how much people love my presentations. But my stuff is so much better than the USMC average because I've had formal training in information transfer ("communication"). Plus I liven it up with spontaneous jokes. But it takes me days to write all those spontaneous jokes, and I like to practice my presentation for a week or two as well. Doing one cold is making me nervous- should I try to recycle material, or just hope that something comes to me?

I'm going to have to do a few makeup classes too, because the powers that be are pulling 40 people from the maintenance shops tomorrow for a boots-n-utes "moto run". Those things only ever motivate me to desert. Luckily, I didn't get picked this time.

Posted by: Boviate at 07:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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