Salem 2 Hi Mill by MECON - Visit of Mr BP Sarkar

I have put in this blog some technical and one semi technical story, hope you shall still read on.

We 3 engineers from MECON - my self, Sri TV Vaidyanathan and Sri CND Nair had some  relief in between the form of engineers sent for small duration of 10 to 15 days. While Sri TV Vaidyanathan has relievers like M/s PC Sahu, Mr J Sahu from Ranchi and Subrata Bhaumik from Kolkata office. For Sri CND Nair, Sri SDR Kumar and Sri DD Sinha came as relievers. For me it was Sri SM Ganguly, who use to come over for approx 7-10 days after I did approx 45 days - maximum number of days not requiring Director's approval those days. During one of the overlap time with Sri SM Ganguly, we had a problem during commissioning of payoff reel. After it's controls was optimized by BHEL, terrific vibrations in foundation were observed during running and particularly during speed changes. The  vibrations was very power full as if the motor will break the foundation. After few trials BHEL lifted their hand. During site discussions Mr SM Ganguly observed that there must be some problem with tacho feed back and we tried at first to locate any cable screening problem. I remember having a dream one day regarding Ohio instrument gearing and it came to my mind that the play in gearing may be playing havoc with the system. Since the KB6 tacho system was very light, the gears play was resulting in un called for vibrations. BHEL did not agree,  my boss agreed with my hypothesis. Result we used a hand kerchief as brake at tacho coupling to create small load on the gears and it dampened the vibrations to a large extent. The foundation were not shaken and our theory was accepted. Result removal of Ohio gears for direct connection of tacho to main gears.Since gearing were needed only to match reels RPM with those of tacho for wrap counting,  this action disabled the wrap counters for both reels completely and automatic slow down after a defined wraps which   never were commissioned again. Mill runs like this even today !

We were informed about Mr BP Sarkar's (then Chief Engineer) visit one day and I  was required to bring him from the station. I went there with our taxi car and received him. His very fist question was did you start rolling in the mill? Since I had improvised roll force cylinder lifting using battery box, and even rolled, I said "yes". He said "Tab hum kya karenga?" This answer remained a matter of joy to me and to my colleagues. He however was furious when he found how we rolled. He started scolding me for putting the mill to peril by rolling without load cells. Such was his fear that I could nor argue with him regarding using relief valve to limit the roll force. He made us run around to adjust speeds of all hydraulic cylinders as per design and Sri CND Nair was sore going up and down to cellar. His next step was to fix tensiometer which had broken bearings. Since he went inside mill housing which was full of grease, we also went inside and spoiled our clothes and shoes. He tried to fix load cells also and spent whole day behind the panel. When ASEA tensiometer and load cells could not be fixed with his clear offer of a good dinner to all BHEL engineers, he agreed to witness rolling using batteries as we did earlier. However he did nor like 100 T load and asked us to increase it to 200 T. We doubled the system pressure as instructed. This however resulted in uncontrolled reduction of material on the two sides and thus in skew. The material will this move to one side and folding up in the reels. Whole day we did not succeed in stable rolling. Only when Mr Sarker left site we changed back to 100 T force for successful mock rolling to be shown to the minister later on.. 

Next re-commissioning of GPE system and visits of Mr TR Rao etc and failure of fire fighting panels,