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This information is provided by the candidate
After completing a four year student internship, at Acton Technical College and D.Napier & Son Ltd., aircraft engine designers and manufacturers, I was drafted into the Royal Air Force to fly against the North Koreans. Fortunately the war ended before my training was completed and I saw no combat.
During my internship I was awarded a prize by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (Patron, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth) and the Glacier Metal Prize for top Mechanical Engineering Student at Acton Tech.,(large glory but little money). So in addition to the normal design and manufacturing functions I was given the opportunity to serve as assistant TO the factory manager organizing the activities of 2000 design and production staff.
On completing my draft sevice I went to the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery in the British Crown Colony of Trinidad and Tobago being given an initial force of 50 augmented by about 100 coolee type laborers to dig up old pipelines and replace them, demolish large corroded gasolene storage tanks contaminated with tetraethyl lead (TEL)all without earthmoving machinery or cranes. Supervised construction of replacement tanks and U.K. contractors building large tanks (one lost his arm when he was sent a package with a booby trap bomb). Quite a culture shock when coming from a clean precision engineering background. Then onto the sulfur removal and recovery department dealing with hot liquid sulfur, sulfur dioxide, acids, hydrogen sulphide and other exotic poisons. Later this plant was shut down by government decree due to adverse worker health and environmental effects. The main general refinery work consisted of taking apart, measuring and reassembling pipes and equipment (much like water district work).
The big break came with Shell International in Venezuela at the new refinery of Cardon. The first project was to convert all the large furnaces from oil burning to natural gas fuel,the various local crafts had their Dutch supervisors. I handled the minor engineering tasks, critical path planning, material supplies, workshop facilities, craft allocation and overall supervision. For this I had to become fluent in spanish. On completion of this project I was able to use my internship experience to reorganize a large heavy equipment workshop mainly serving several hundred industrial diesel engines driving construction cranes, compressors, welding machines, forklift trucks, portable pumps,large fire engines, air/steam driven pumps, emergency generators. Reducing personel from 75 to 50 and incresing equipment availability from an initial zero, to several acres of fully serviced equipment ready to go. All the fixed lifting equipment and overhead cranes testing and maintenance were under my control. As an interest, I made a form which created the spanish instructions for the use of a german balancing machine so that a person with no balancing theory could balance shafts, impellers, electric motor rotors and this was done to all items that were serviced in the workshops. Just at this time the equipment engineer for the whole refinery, a very senior position, had his hearing and sense of blance permanently destroyed,by jackhammer noises inside a vessel, and I was appointed in his place with the additional duty of noise control. It seems crazy now, but nearly every one of the 1300 pumps in the refinery was pulled every year for maintenace regardless of its condition. Using the initially sketchy workshop reports, balanced rotating elements and standardized lubrication, I determimed that most pumps could be scheduled to run for up to 5 years (40,000 hours)with only the known bad actors having shorter intervals. This produced a spectacular reduction in workshop loads. I did not invent it, but I did implement the Shell standardized lubricating program and ran the thousands of bearings of the whole refinery on 3 oils and 2 greases using the available labor, many of whom could not read or write. An integral part of the job was to modify, or change completely, pump characteristics to suit frequently changed refinery process requirements. I, or a member of my staff did the engineering as a routine matter and were responsible for the results, even if the operating department did not fully understand its needs.
At my request, I left Shell International to rejoin Shell USA as the machinery engineer for the Willmington and the Dominguez refineries in Los Angeles. It was similar work to the Cardon refinery but restricted by having to obtain the equipment manufacturers permission to modify many of the fans and pumps even though they were not new. The Air Quality District demanded performance beyond the structural strength of pump shafts and made other demands that it was obvious that regardless of the need for refining capacity their objective was to shut down all the refineries in Los Angeles. I understand that now Shell has no refineries in Los Angeles. I decided that the goverment climate was not good for refineries and I took the hard decision to give up my 10 years of service and the good treatment with Shell and join Bechtel Corp. for work in Caracas Venezuela (taking my green card).
The contract was for the change of electrical frequency from 50Hz to the US standard 60Hz. It does not sound much but it speeds up, by 20%, everything driven by an electric motor. That means pumps,fans,compressors, industrial machinery,machine tools,v-belt drives,elevators,even washing machines,record players,movie projectors in every house,shop and factory served by Electricidad de Caracas at 50Hz or approximately one million customers. I establised the standards for modifying the thousands of v-belt drives and the thousands of relatively small centrifugal pumps and larger industrial pumps. When dealing with large quantities of equipment there are always exceptions to keep up the interest. As a routine matter all the municipal drinking water systems were changed, and often upgraded, to supply water 24 hours per day instead of 2 to 4 hours per day by making low cost or even no-cost changes to the systems. On completing our overall work the national water administration (I.N.O.S.) gave us an elaborate dinner and party for our help.
On returning to the USA I helped to design the non-nuclear piping and pumping systems of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Stations (SONGS, Units 2&3). Then on to the engineering and control(from Los Angeles) of all the principal pumps of the Navajo Genrating Station in Page Arizona. Then off to Mexico City to become the Chief Mechanical Engineer of Bechtel Corp. (BICA) in Mexico. Then back to the USA in charge of the Office Engineering for the maintenance work on the San Onofre Unit 1 and SMUD nuclear plants in Sacramento. With the decline of power plant work, I took the opportunity to enter into International administration for Macadamia Nuts from Australia, Pharmaceuticals from France and Sports Clothing from Mexico. Over the years of Administration no customer lost any product or a single dollar. Presently I am on the Board of Directors of Rainbow Municipal Water District.
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