| Client: | Schaumburg Specialties |
| Industry: | Metal Fabrication |
| Services: | Custom Racks and Carts for all industries |
| Location: | Illinois |
Enter our very own Eric and Tom, to take on the challenge of figuring out the problem and what we needed to do to solve it!
The Challenge Part 1:
At Schaumburg HQ, we have a 65-ft long fully sealed industrial spray painting booth with double door openings 18ft wide and 18ft high. We use the booth to carry out our industrial equipment painting services with our specialist enamel, epoxy, polyurethane and GatorHyde elastomer coatings.
The roof of our large industrial spray painting booth at Schaumburg HQ
The challenge we were facing was with our air make-up unit, which replaces contaminated air exhausted during the process of industrial painting in the booth with clean, heated outdoor air (the air coming in needs to be warm, as cold air is not conducive to high quality paint finishes – or to employee comfort!).
The air make-up unit that services our spray booth
We’d been leaving the doors to the booth open and letting clean air filter in from our main building and workshop – but this was obviously far from ideal and we needed to find a long term solution.
Diagnosing what was actually wrong with the air make-up unit was the first part of the challenge. It contains four main parts – a blower, a burner, a motor and a VFD (variable frequency drive) control box – and we weren’t sure which part of the unit was causing the problem.
By process of elimination (and years of know-how), we worked out that it was probably the motor, but we called in a specialist company who utilised specialist resistance measuring equipment to check it out. It didn’t take long for them to confirm our suspicions; the motor had completely blown and would need replacing.
The Challenge Part 2:
Once we’d ascertained that it was the motor in the air make up unit that was the problem, we moved on to the logistics of how to remove and replace it.
The motor is a huge 50 horsepower (hp) piece of equipment and weighs a whopping 700lbs. Our spray paint booth is also large; the roof is 25ft high in the air and the air make up unit is situated quite a distance from the edge of the building.
It was going to be no mean feat to extract the large, heavy motor out of the air make-up unit, get it safely across the roof of the building and down onto the ground and then hoist a new motor up onto the roof and into the unit in its place!
Our Solution:
One thing was certain, we needed some heavy duty equipment to complete this job!
We decided that using an engine hoist would be the best way to extract the motor from the air make-up unit. We also decided to hire a telehandler (which is capable of pivoting up and down and extending outwards with a wide reach) to lift everything we needed up onto the roof and bring it back down again. This included a garden cart with soft tires that we used to transport both the old and new motors across the roof of the spray paint booth.
Eric got behind the wheel of the telehandler (fulfilling a boyhood dream!) and raised the engine hoist and garden cart onto the roof, where Tom, our technician, used the hoist to remove the motor from the air make-up unit.
Tom used the engine hoist to extract the motor from the air make-up unit
Once the old motor was safely on the ground, it was loaded onto a cart and taken into our workshop by Tom to be scrapped as we had ascertained that it had no reusable parts.
The old motor was brought into our workshop
Before the new motor could be installed in the air make-up unit, we needed to make sure that its nuts and bolts were all securely in place. We also had to be sure that the motor’s new wires were connected properly and that the new motor was compatible with the voltage of electricity being supplied to the make-up unit. It was Tom’s job to make all this happen!
Tom made sure the new motor was primed and ready to go
Once the new motor was ready to be installed, it was taken out to the telehandler on a pallet and Eric hoisted it up to the roof of the spray booth building where Tom was waiting to receive it.
The telehandler lifted the new motor onto the roof
Once on the roof, it was taken over to the air make-up unit using the garden cart and then Tom used the engine hoist once more to install the new motor in the air make-up unit.
When the new motor was safely installed in the air make-up unit, the telehandler brought all the equipment that we’d used to extract the old motor and install the new one back down to the ground.
Now the air make-up unit in our industrial spray painting booth is firing on all cylinders and we can carry on providing the fantastic coatings and finishes that we’re famous for. We had great fun diagnosing the problem and working on a solution in our own backyard! All in a day’s work for Schaumburg Specialties!
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