Life is Full of Ups & Downs - Part 15

Very recently I had an email from Frank Freson, the "mysterious Frank" to whom I referred in episode 13 of this occasional series.

In his email Frank was able to tell the true story of what happened that day back in the mists of time and also offered to provide me with some information and anecdotal input about his days (two years as an apprentice) on the tools with Arnold Elevators.

As a preface to those reminiscences, the following is a potted history of Frank's career after he left Arnolds. The words are his and I've just edited the length where necessary.

===========================================================================

 After breaking up my apprenticeship, and moving out on my own, I did a couple of different jobs until I decided to go back to electrical work, because I already had some training and experience in that field.

I got a break with a contractor in Bondi as an unlicensed electrical mechanic and after a few years had gained enough experience to apply for a job as a leading hand which then lead to a foreman's position (still unlicensed) on a 200-men army barrack in Randwick.

At that point I was now in charge of licensed electricians and that's when I said to myself "If they can get a license, so can I", so I studied and sat for the license examination.

I had some good breaks in my career and was given the opportunity to learn more than my fair share (estimating, switch-gear, substations, mining and heavy industrial).

I soon got into contract management and administration, electrical designs, and travelled a fair bit.

I moved to Belgium in 1989 and picked up a job as the assistant project coordinator for a Traffic Control and Surveillance System (TCSS) in a road tunnel project the company had in Hong Kong, their contract was for the engineering design,  the supply of material and equipment, test & commission

In 1991 I was sent with a team to test & commission the job, it was scheduled to take 6 weeks, it took longer than 3 months. Before long they made me the local contract manager and I ended up staying in Hong Kong for 2 years.

I ended up meeting my wife and came back to Brisbane after 2 years.
Then came the mining crash - I was with an engineering consulting group and in my final role as a discipline lead on a project for the Ranger uranium mine. I had joined them as No. 39 in a business unit and when I was the last of 9 I had the choice of taking unpaid leave for a year, or move on.

So I retired instead.

=================================================================================

What follows is a collection of Frank's memories of working for two years with Arnold's.
Many thanks, Frank, for providing me with these recollections and I invite anyone who would like to add to "Life is Full of Ups & Downs" to just email me the stories.


Now read on.......... 

I owe a lot to Brian Baxter because he was a good teacher and he certainly piqued my interest in control circuits which proved to be invaluable in later years.

To this day I never forgot the terminal markings in the lift control circuit (at least I “think” that I remember): DC, DC1, DC2, SS, SB.

If the grey matter still works DC was the feed off the rectifier heading down to the first set of door-locks which came back on DC1 before heading back down to the second set of door-locks and coming back on SS. From SS it then went off to the car safeties (stop button, trap door switch, slack rope switch, roof top isolator, and the safety gear) and came back to SB. In those days the ‘terminal’ were simply brass screws through the insulated panel, we didn’t have those fancy modern terminals that comes in all shapes and sizes then.

I must admit that during those early days of working mostly on DC controlled systems I was under the impression that everything had a + & - polarity until the day I ended up in an awkward position when I was in the office and had to refit the fluorescent tubes in the foreman’s office that had just been painted.

Seeing 2 pins at each end of the tube I asked the foreman which one had to go in first, he replied “The one with the green dot”; needless to say I couldn’t find one and everybody had a laugh at my expenses.

Grace Building.

I remember few things about that project such as marble being used for the control panels [I think it was slate, Frank. BK] and seeing an arc between 2 contacts that was slowly eroding the marble away until we knocked off the main circuit breaker.

I also remember twisting the strands of a bare earth wire with the old ‘egg-beater’ to make the wire stiffer so it could be used as a ‘snake’ and pushed through conduits. The pub across the road was a popular stop for lunches but apprentices were generally too young to be there so we had to make do with a milkshake and a pie from the place next door.

A memorable event that came out of the old memories was seeing a lift that had just pulled up at a landing where we were working on another one and hearing that they couldn’t get it started again; no worries I’ll go up to the motor room and check.

As I entered the lift motor room I saw one of the main circuit breaker on the wall was open and not seeing anybody in the room (everyone was working around the building) I thought it had tripped and switched it back on. That’s when I heard somebody yell out from the corner of the room.

I forget who it was and but it could have been Clive (?) with somebody else being shown something near a motor; they had taken upon themselves to disable the lift for a few moments without telling anybody else or using our “Out of service cards” that we use to place outside a lift and at each landing to let the public know.

Every got a major scare, no one got hurt and I got yelled at for turning the circuit breaker back on without first checking around, realising that I could have killed or seriously hurt someone I also yelled back that they should not have done what they did without letting somebody know. I was never dragged over the coals over that incident or remember hearing anything else about it.

The Haunted Lift?

A building where we did some regular maintenance was 10-odd floors high and probably located in Wentworth Street [Avenue. BK], but being such a long time ago its location is a bit vague. I remember the floor-level controller being a modern one for those days, it consisted of rows of limit switches for each floor that were actuated by cams as a small panel, driven through a reduction gearbox to move up and down in line with the lift car, passed by those switches.

Part of our inspection was to ride inside the lift to confirm it stopped level with the landing and we usually did this on the way out before going to our next job.

One morning we entered the lift on the top floor, pressed the buttons for each floor, confirmed they were all lit up, and down we went; 10-9-8-7-6-4-. What? Did we just miss 5? The lift continued on, 3-2-1-G and then headed back to 5 where it stopped. We repeated the test and this time there were no more glitches in the matrix.

I could have been with Dave or Brian at the time but he headed back to the lift motor room where he checked everything on that floor controller without finding a fault or a cause for missing that floor. It never happened again.

A Sweet Sticky Job.

An old lift was located in a factory that made those little single serve, square shaped, sugar pack that you could get with your tea or coffee, and the whole place was covered in sugar dust, including the top of the lift car

Each time we turned the inspection light on top of car it would burn a layer of sugar powder if we didn’t dust it down first but even then there was still the smell of burnt sugar in the air.

Our hands, clothes, and tools would always end up being sticky with sugar and had to be cleaned up after each visit. After going there a few times it wasn't one of my favourite job but I didn’t need to worry for very long because on our next visit we discovered the building had been destroyed by fire. I don’t know the official cause of that fire but with that sugar powder covering everything it’s not hard to imagine that it was an accident waiting to happen.

[That building was Industrial Sugar Mills and was located in Surry Hills.

I also can remember with shudders what it was like working there; in summer when you sweated you walked out feeling like a large serving of fairy-floss!!. BK]

Tomasetti House.

I’m not 100% sure if that was the name of a particular building where we rewired the door locks while the lift was being re-roped but after reading the blog it sounds like that it probably was that building.

I remember that we were being held up and couldn't start wiring the locks because the lift was held near the top floor by its safety gear when they took the old ropes off.

At the time the bottom lift door was open to give access to the bottom of the well and I came up with the idea that I could climb up in the lift shaft and release the catch as I went past so we could open the doors and start our job.

Imagine suggesting or doing something like that today?

Well, rules were vastly different then and even thought it sounds dangerous we never did something that we couldn’t do safely; so off I went up the lift shaft, and released the latch while somebody else opened the door. As I moved up to the next one I’d say “See you on the next floor.”

Set Up?

There was an old lift from another company with a totally different design than anything we had, and Arnold had been given a contract for regular maintenance.

It had a unique floor levelling system consisting of metal tape, with perforations through the tape to represent each floor, and that tape was attached to the bottom and top of the lift in a single loop and guided by a sheave in the lift well and one in the lift motor room. The actual controller was an electronic assembly using a light source and photo-electric cell in a glass tube (like the old valve used in radios and televisions) and an amplifier (again using valves) to drive a relay. The photocell would only be activated when the light shone through one of the holes in the metal tape as it looped up and down with the lift motion.

One morning we were inside the lift motor room for the regular maintenance and as the lift ran we heard a loud squeak as we caught a glimpse of a rat that had been hanging on the tape flying through the sheave. We searched the lift well but never found it.

About a week later Brian came back from making one of his daily calls to pick up our next job and said we had 2 jobs to do, the first was to deliver a message and the second was to go to this site and find out why the lift wasn’t working, and then asked me which one I would like.

I asked if he trusted me with the breakdown and he replied yes because he had taught me everything he knew about that lift. I grabbed his tool-bag and proceeded to the job where upon arriving and seeing the lift operating I said to myself ‘Great, an intermittent fault’ and called the caretaker. The first thing the caretaker mentioned about the problem was an awful smell inside the lift, and that’s when I remember that rat.

It was in the liftwell, dead as a doorknob and smelling like a dead rat. Cleaning it up was not what I expected and never discovered if Brian set me up or not.

Electrocuted!

One day as we phoned in for our next job (I can’t remember if I was with was Brian or Dave) we were told that a man had been electrocuted in a lift and they couldn’t get him out; we got the address and rushed over even running up the street. When we entered the building we found the lift was near the top floor so off we ran up the stairs; being the youngest I got there before the tradesman and discovered a gentlemen sitting on a chair inside the lift, looking quite normal.

We asked him what was wrong and he said he received an electric shock when he tried to open the external door. Looking at the door handle we immediately realised that it was a type that should never be live because it was a mechanical lock, not an electric one.

Not taking any chances we tested first and then opened the door to let him out. We inspected the equipment in the lift shaft to make sure there was nothing unexpected and came to a conclusion that static electricity was the only thing that shocked him.

The Vaseline.

That particular building is also one where we installed new trailing cables and, being an old boy scout, I always end up with the job of wrapping the loop of cable under the car with twine, to hold the trailing cables in place. We also used Vaseline to ease the cable through tight spots and the jar was always at the wrong end of the well when you needed it.

I wonder what people working in the building were thinking when they heard us yelling inside the lift shaft “Where’s the Vaseline”, “Pass me the Vaseline!”. Of course we just acted like children!

The Striped Paint.

Again I forget the site or who was involved but I remember that we had to replace some floor boards in the motor room and do some general upgrade work including repainting the equipment in that “Arnold green” colour.

As you came up into the motor room there was also a low beam where it was easy to hit your head on the way in, so a decision was made to paint it with broad stripes to make it stand out. The tradesman gave money to one of the apprentices and sent him out to buy a few things including a tin of white and black stripe paint.

That *apprentice was away for ages and he finally came back with a tin of white and another tin of black paint; as he handed them to the tradesman he said that he had walked all over the city and couldn’t find any but in the last shop the salesman said he could take those 2 tins and mix his own on site.

The truth is that he quickly wised up and just did a bit of window shopping to pass the time and make it look as if he had been walking all over town to find that special paint!

*So who was the apprentice, Frank?! Hmmm?!