Houston, We’ve Had a Problem…

From our post of November 16th:

For the first time in several years, everything seems to have come together, the stars have aligned and we’re able to run our Christmas Sale as we would want to. No-one’s ill, there are no domestic hindrances, pandemics, material shortages or equipment failures.

Why-oh-why did we say anything to agitate the Gods of Fate ? Keep it zipped and keep your heads down, that’s the way to play it. Stay schtum and count your blessings. That would be the sensible thing to do, but no, we had to tempt providence…

Day one of sale orders, the centrifuge began to play up. Not too badly, it was still running so we could continue to cast and fill orders. OK, we thought, just take note, nurse it through the sale and we’ll get it serviced first thing in the new year. Nope. It steadily deteriorated over the first week of the sale to the point where it was hindering production.

It was the motor, that was pretty obvious – electric motors aren’t supposed to spark noisily, are they ? So we knew what the problem was, which is often half the battle. We had an old non-functioning motor, the predecessor to this one which packed in just before Salute a decade or so ago, so the plan was to try to limp along with the current one, get the old one repaired, and then swap them over. The issue would be getting it fixed, since casting centrifuges are rare bits of kit. First call was a branch of a large engineering firm not far from us who took one look at it and said nope, can’t fix those. This felt like a brush off, more of a ‘we don’t want to fix that’ rather than ‘we can’t fix that’. Slightly perturbed but undaunted we found a branch of the firm that made the original motor and tried them – ‘we don’t do repairs but we’ll give you a quote for a new one’. The price was eye-watering enough, but more so was the time – 12-14 weeks! We couldn’t afford to be offline for three months! By then it was approaching the end of sale week two and, on cue, the centrifuge decided to cease functioning altogether, so we were really in the mire.

We despairingly tried the repair route again. Two other firms simply didn’t bother to answer our emails, but we came up with a firm in Ashford (around 25 miles from Brigade HQ) that specialises in rebuilding motors. It proved to be third time lucky, as they tested it, gave us a quote (still a lot but less than half the cost of a new one) and completely stripped and rebuilt it in just four days*. So halfway through week three of the sale (that’s this week – keep up) we were able to collect a fully refurbished and functioning motor.

It took the two of us about three hours to wrestle the old 17.5kg piece of dead weight out of the machine, bolt in the new one and wire it up. But we got there, plugged everything in and … nothing. The power light came on, all the pneumatics worked (air pressure is used to clamp the mould halves together) but the motor did nothing. After much head-scratching and checking of wires, we decided to give up and sleep on it. This morning Tony spent three increasingly frustrating hours fiddling with just about everything that could be fiddled with until there came a eureka moment. There are two inline fuses on the main circuit board which had been ignored up to that point, mainly because they don’t look like fuses (see below). In an act of desperation these were swapped for new ones and, what do you know – we had power! The old motor must have blown these as its final act before expiring last week, but since the main fuse was still ok and the primary power light came on we hadn’t considered blown fuses as a possible source of the problem.

Circled are the two guilty fuses.

So after all this waffle, here’s the bit that affects you, the reader. In a nutshell, we’re a bit behind on orders. We managed to get half-a-dozen done in the final couple of hours today, but that still leaves quite a bit of a backlog. We’ve been able to cast resin as normal so we’ve kept up to date with that and consequently many of the outstanding orders only need a couple of metal bits to complete them. At a rough guess, if we have a productive time next week we should be able to get all of the current accumulation of orders cleared by the end of it. Obviously any new orders placed will be pushed on to the following week – although the sale ends on the 15th which will dramatically slow the flow. So we’ve had a problem, but we’re over the main hurdle and working to get back to normal.

And finally – if you live in Canada you’ll be more than aware that your postal service is on strike. As a result, Royal Mail have suspended all services to Canada and we can’t post anything to you. We’re going to complete orders as normal and sit on them until the industrial action ends, then we’ll be able to send them. If you desperately need your order quickly then get in touch and we’ll sort out a courier service for you, although inevitably this will cost a bit extra.

And finally finally – if you live in the EU then your order is on its way, we did manage to get those out before the motor fizzed and died. We hope to find a solution and resume EU sales sometime in 2025.

*If anyone needs an electric motor fixed, we can’t recommend KB Rewinds highly enough.