Six outgoing PMGs shipped via FEDEX. So far, so good!
Although there is little to fail in this design, it is always reassuring that help is NOT far off. Part of the strategy for mission critical operations is to have a ‘repair and return’ or ‘hot spare’ sent quickly as possible. Key to our plan is the heavy METAL box that we ship in.
UPS and USPS taught us just how poorly a package or crate can be treated, and we have found that this BOX is really a mandatory part of our strategy to Deliver what our customers want. We’ve learned that it can be more difficult to deliver a package to Silver City New Mexico than into Entebbe, Uganda!
KEEP your metal box, toss it up in the rafters of your shop, use it to store your gold bars or whatever, but keep it. Should you ever ship the PMG, bolt it into the box as you received it and send it on. At this time, we Favor FEDEX for shipping, so far, so good.
There are several reasons we suggest people in the field >NOT< service the internals of the PMGs.
People don’t realize just how much soil around them can be picked up by a strong magnet. To open up the unit in the field can contaminate it. Best thing to do is lay down a drop cloth about 10 feet by 10 feet, and set up a table in the center to work off of. Wipe down every tool, remove every nut or screw you take off to another table. The next problem in field repairs is pulling the fan, it’s an interference fit, and you need add lots of heat for a short duration to expand the alloy fan hub, then lift off the fan with gloves, this can NOT be done with a little propane torch, as you can’t get enough heat into the fan quick enough. another item to work around is lock tight is added as the fan is cooling, this makes for a ‘reliable’ connection, but don’t EVER expect to get it off without heat! reliability is far more important in this mission critical design than easy removal!
Once the fan is removed, you can remove the end bells and service the bearings, you can do this leaving the rotor in the stator, but there are tricks to pulling the rotor without killing yourself if you live in Timbuktu and really need to do it yourself. The rotor is VERY dangerous outside the stator, if you are NOT careful you could easily lose a hand!
I will not forget some of our R&D efforts here, you sneak up on the stator holding onto the back end of the rotor, all of a sudden, the rotor leaves your hand like a missile and ends up inside the stator. But as the basic teach you, the stator is moving as well if it can. It our case, the wooden stop we had set up to keep the stator in place was ripped form the table top! when this happened, the stator, and the corners of the cooling fins ripped into one of the Engineers hands, and he Bleed like a Stuck pig. The event caused me to stock some larger absorbent pads in the shop first aid kit.
For these reasons, we offer a repair and return service, and there’s also a ‘HOT SPARE SERVICE’ but you MUST return your PMG in the metal box we shipped it in, OR buy a second box from us to ship in. Certainly, we understand things can be insured, but we have learned just how impossible it can be to collect. UPS’s typical ploy is to belittle you for not hiring an engineer to design the package, and to tell you that your insurance is no good because it was improperly packaged. However, they don’t warn you of that when they’re taking your insurance money, at least that was my experience.
So now we have an engineered box 🙂