Old elevators

[cstmg8]

The other thread had some interest, and politics suck, so:

Gotta love a job with prints on site [emoji849]

Glad to have them trouble shooting these though:

Old Otis traction cars with generators and dc motors. These cars run a "pie pan selector" Wich basically runs a set of contacts representing the car, and each disc represents a floor.

I would try to get better pics, but the machine room is too small!

Old thread is locked here:

https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink/topic?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ecolumbusracing%2Ecom%2Fforums%2Fshowthread%2Ephp%3Ft%3D129891&share_tid=129891&share_fid=42687&share_type=t&link_source=app

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Gergwheel1647545492]

holy shit thats cool, and scary knowing that stuff is "in charge"

[gillbot]

holy shit thats cool, and scary knowing that stuff is "in charge"

 

That shit is built like a tank though.

 

We have some OLD pulleys at our Maysville office.

[cstmg8]

Those are really cool. We still had an account downtown that had wooden rails and ran on a leather belt. Pretty neat to see.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Mace1647545504]

Those are really cool. We still had an account downtown that had wooden rails and ran on a leather belt. Pretty neat to see.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

 

That's craziness ..leather stretches how can it still be working properly??

Those pics were awesome !!

[gillbot]

There’s an escalator that we power with old leather belts and wooden pulleys to this day. It’s to show the durability of our old parts that were made in the late 1890’s I believe. Even with stretch, there’s a tensioner.

[cstmg8]

It had to be replaced occasionally. Every time we would set the safeties on the wooden rails, we'd have to replace a section.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[cstmg8]

There’s an escalator that we power with old leather belts and wooden pulleys to this day. It’s to show the durability of our old parts that were made in the late 1890’s I believe. Even with stretch, there’s a tensioner.

What company do you work for again?

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[gillbot]

Regal Beloit but my division was part of Emerson

https://www.regalbeloit.com/brands/Browning/History

[Mensan]

That's craziness ..leather stretches how can it still be working properly??

Those pics were awesome !!

 

From an engineering perspective everything has a useful expected life. Parts need to be changed on a scheduled basis to ensure it's working properly. If a machine is engineered properly, and maintained the way it should be, and the part was made with no defects, it should always work as expected. Since the previously listed items are almost never at 100%, we have failures.

[unfunnyryan]

I love stuff like this. It looks so intimidating at first but if you have a basic understanding and know what problem you're experiencing... nevermind, I'm going to assuming theres no prior documentation of anything and 34 different guys have already fucked with it

[cstmg8]

I love stuff like this. It looks so intimidating at first but if you have a basic understanding and know what problem you're experiencing... nevermind, I'm going to assuming theres no prior documentation of anything and 34 different guys have already fucked with it

Hahaha, oh, so you've been there before?

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[cstmg8]

I love stuff like this. It looks so intimidating at first but if you have a basic understanding and know what problem you're experiencing... nevermind, I'm going to assuming theres no prior documentation of anything and 34 different guys have already fucked with it

You are correct though, with a decent set of prints, you're much more likely to repair that right away (simple parts, etc..) than you are a mess of a 90's controller like this:

 

Or even an old 60's relay logic controller that has been modified/repaired for 50 yrs.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[gillbot]

^

 

That’s the kind of stuff I’m used to working on in the old steel mills and power plants. Motors made in the 1950’s that have never been out for service yet still work all day every day.

 

Typically there’s AC coming in, we run it through an MG set to convert it to DC and run our gear on the DC.

[Mensan]

The older stuff is just relay logic using contacts, right?

[cstmg8]

The older stuff is just relay logic using contacts, right?

Yessir

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[unfunnyryan]

You are correct though, with a decent set of prints, you're much more likely to repair that right away (simple parts, etc..) than you are a mess of a 90's controller like this:

 

 

First of all, that old sony mini CRT is pornographic

 

Second of all, yeah, I routinely put up with hundreds of unlabeled cables and tracing them out. Even more fun with fiber when you can't interrupt service or tone it.

[cstmg8]

Yeah, the crt was pretty cool for it's era. It basically showed inputs and outputs for each circuit. As long as you knew which row/column to look at, you could see your I/O's.

That controller looks worse than usual, because it's actually a '90s O Thompson that we were in the middle of modding. Basically that's the group controller that handled dispatching for all the cars, and we had to integrate the new controllers as we replaced nine elevators one at a time, until we could switch to the new hall risers. Essentially integrating discrete with serial.

I'll dig up some pics of that machine room, I'm pretty proud of the transformation.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Tractor]

That is fascinating stuff to me, sometimes I get to work in those elevator rooms, usually to diagnose the phone connection back to the comm rooms in the hotels here. I got to work side by side some of the elevator guys here for a couple days on a remodel. Very cool.

 

The comm rooms I go in look about like your wiring messes except not as old. Usually there's a mix of equipment I'm working on going back to the `80-90's at the most, I had an old OS2 Warp system I was working on for one of the hotels. I handle outside DMARC all the way to windows server configurations then down to the desktop or end points and everything in between on a daily basis so I never know what I'm gonna be doing or what company I'm gonna be at, keeps it very interesting.

 

Now if I could get rid of all those old US Robotics 56K modems I see being used as a remote connection.

[cstmg8]

That is fascinating stuff to me, sometimes I get to work in those elevator rooms, usually to diagnose the phone connection back to the comm rooms in the hotels here. I got to work side by side some of the elevator guys here for a couple days on a remodel. Very cool.

 

The comm rooms I go in look about like your wiring messes except not as old. Usually there's a mix of equipment I'm working on going back to the `80-90's at the most, I had an old OS2 Warp system I was working on for one of the hotels. I handle outside DMARC all the way to windows server configurations then down to the desktop or end points and everything in between on a daily basis so I never know what I'm gonna be doing or what company I'm gonna be at, keeps it very interesting.

 

Now if I could get rid of all those old US Robotics 56K modems I see being used as a remote connection.

Hahaha, some of the phone/networking rooms I see in buildings are terrifying, I feel for you. Weeknd up working with a lot of phone/it guys because customers go to voice over IP or data lines and the elevator phones don't work anymore.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[unfunnyryan]

That is fascinating stuff to me, sometimes I get to work in those elevator rooms, usually to diagnose the phone connection back to the comm rooms in the hotels here.

 

I'm so sorry if you've ever had to deal with one of these with WOW and the shitty Cisco (and more recently ObiHai) ATAs we used to service them

 

Hahaha, some of the phone/networking rooms I see in buildings are terrifying, I feel for you. Weeknd up working with a lot of phone/it guys because customers go to voice over IP or data lines and the elevator phones don't work anymore.

 

Same to you, but man do I look over a lot of tickets where 40 year old telephone wiring on an elevator is the reason you're getting shit voltage at the far end. I can only amp it so much if its on an adtran.

[cstmg8]

I'm so sorry if you've ever had to deal with one of these with WOW and the shitty Cisco (and more recently ObiHai) ATAs we used to service them

 

 

 

Same to you, but man do I look over a lot of tickets where 40 year old telephone wiring on an elevator is the reason you're getting shit voltage at the far end. I can only amp it so much if its on an adtran.

Definitely, we often have to switch wires in the travel cable, or run all new. I've seen old installs with phone line hanging in the hoist way like the travel cable, moving with the car!

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

[Tractor]

Definitely, we often have to switch wires in the travel cable, or run all new. I've seen old installs with phone line hanging in the hoist way like the travel cable, moving with the car!

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

 

Thats a neat trick. Hope its the nice stranded wire.

 

Here I deal with a ton of salt air corrosion I bet the elevator systems are a mess from that. I see 1 or 2 year old wifi access points in the hotels that have the ethernet jacks pins completely rusted out or corroded so badly they are shorting everything out.

[Tractor]

I'm so sorry if you've ever had to deal with one of these with WOW and the shitty Cisco (and more recently ObiHai) ATAs we used to service them

 

We don't have WOW stuff here, but I've ran into ObiHai a few times. I do a lot of the Adtrans and my really shitty stuff are from Vonage. I was in a business a while back that had 14 phone lines being switched to Vonage... So what did they do? Why ship to site 14 of those little home Vonage ATA's with power bricks and all. I was way out on the outerbanks at a "home office" for a restaurant supply company, it was literally some rich rednecks giant house out in the middle of a marsh on the cape fear river. I say redneck because it was like visiting one of my relatives places in southern ohio except bigger. Dude had a bridge over a swamp to an island and then another bridge over to his main island to a huge house, very nice with high end cars, hunting truck and his hunting dogs. He loved that I showed up wearing a Remington shotgun belt;-)

 

Sometimes I love the places my job takes me.

[Geeto67]

when I lived in Boston, I lived in an old building with one of those 1930's steel cage elevators with the manual floor control lever. Are there any of those old style still operating in Ohio?