THE INTERVIEW
REEL equips, renovates and upgrades lifting equipment for hydro-electric plants.
doing things. In fact, I was the first person in the company to implement AutoCAD.
OCH: Tell us about your success stories? SR: I have many success stories but the one I’m most proud of is designing the transfer systems for the truck plants at car manufacturer all over Canada, the USA and Mexico.
At the time, this client had one of our frame turnovers, a crane and a robot used in the production of trucks. When they are built on a frame, the frame is turned upside down so the workers can start putting the parts that go into it, under the truck. Once the parts are installed, they have to flip it
back over. The machine has front and rear rotation, so it picks up the frame, raises it, rotates it as it transfers, and then sets it onto another conveyor. We’ve supplied equipment including a body marriage where they take the body of the truck and marry it to the frame and frame loaders, where they load the frames onto the production line. All this equipment is fully automated within the robot cell, where they run one cycle a minute, 24 hours a day, almost 365 days a year. We started producing them in 1990 and some of them are still operating today. It's a very sturdy piece
of equipment, and I'm quite proud of what we were able to accomplish.
OCH: Tell us about your failures and how you overcame any challenges? SR: We don’t have any failures where the equipment could not be brought to production, but there are always challenges. For example, we had to provide a Spillway Gate Hoist, for a hydro client in South Carolina, which is a hoist that raises a gate so that the level of a reservoir can be brought back to a comfortable level, so it doesn't flood. The challenges we faced there, were with the gearbox on 11 hoists. We had to limit the forces exerted by those hoists so that the structure wouldn't crumble. And limit the maximum force that the hoist could
exert on the gate so that it wouldn't collapse. What we found out, was that the limits we had set at the beginning were too low due to the gearbox inefficiency which would absorb part of the motor torque, preventing us from seeing the real weight of the force. It took a while to find out where the problem was but once we detected it, we could compensate by using a higher motor torque and still limit the maximum amount of force that the hoist itself could produce.
OCH: What do you like about this business? SR: I love the fact that we make custom cranes, it's never boring because it always changes even if some of what we do is similar, such as hydro energy.
I mentioned the powerhouse cranes and gantry cranes we provide and the truck handling and dam project and what I find fascinating, from an electrical side is that technology evolves much faster than the mechanical portion of the crane. A piece of steel is a piece of steel. Once you know how to weld it and arrange it, it's mainly repetitive. But, on the electrical and automation side, we try to make sure we provide the newest available technology to minimize the obsolescence of the equipment we're delivering to our customer. All the automation components are talking to each other so that we detect any possible faults that could arise. The danger of overhead equipment is that once you're lifting your load, you're accumulating potential energy and if you're not able to control that, it could be disastrous. We're used to dealing with those challenges and making sure that we manage our design to prevent a catastrophe from happening.
42 | Spring 2024 |
www.ochmagazine.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51
