Thursday, February 4, 2010

Thursday at most at the O'Brien

Ross,
  Hope you and G have a safe trip home. Sorry, we couldn't arrange to get all the snow removed in Ottawa before-hand!
 
I was at the OB today. I pulled up to the parking lot, and only then realized I didn't bring the key for the theatre with me. Crap. Then I remembered the paint place, walked in there, was told Murray was in the theatre...sure enough he was.
 
The bulk of my day was working on the trumpet chest. I tightened the ventil pipe feeding air into the chest and then tried to fix the cyphers. I identified which pipes were cyphering, then off with the relay bottoms to remove dirt.  But no luck there.  I noticed quite the air leak between two ends of the chest (bottoms), so I removed (eventually) all three. One of the chest bottoms was missing a gasket on the end, so I made a gasket and glued same to the chest with some hide glue. This resolved one leak anyway.
 
The entire chest is already wired/plugged into a pod, and so I attempted to fire up each of the remaining trumpets using a test lead.  This was ad-hoc at best. Some pipes came on, then stayed on...hmm. Others didn't spark up at all. So, I figured it best to investigate these issues under your excellent tutoring.
 
I quickly checked the second regulator. With the ventil outlet closed, it has ~6.5" rise. I couldn't see any hole to measure the 6" air pressure, nor turn off the air at the chest, so I wasn't able to perform this task. I did notice that when the ventil outlet it opened, both regulators 'drop' (fall?).
 
At one point, the 7.5 hp motor/fan unit stopped. I thought someone had turned it off on me. But it would appear the on/off switch-breaker tripped.  I restarted the motor, but I did notice the breaker box was warm to the touch (versus the the 6 hp breaker box). Maybe this has happened to you in the past?
 
Well, that's it for now. A little disheartening as I don't have much progress to report.
 
Jack