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I've specified painting systems for navigation lock gates and dam gates for many years. We always used 2 coats of epoxy for immersion service, and zinc-rich with epoxy and a polyurethane topcoat for splash-zone stuff.

Am hoping this thread would be a collection of good continuing education courses. I was pretty weak on the electrical side, and I just finished the distance ed. electromechanical technician certificate through George Brown College: http://www.emcourse.com/ It's nominally a 34-week thing, but...

IMHO, Director should not be going to you directly. Line of authority is through your boss. That the Director is cutting your boss out of the equation is a real problem, unfortunately you are in the middle of it. Is there any way you could say to the Director when he asks you to do things...

British Columbia guidebook for owners of small dams: written for a pretty "lay" audience, but a good overview: http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wsd/public_safety/dam_safety/cabinet/inspection.pdf Ontario "best management practices" for dam safety reviews: overview of scope...

I find all this salary secrecy stuff odd. I'm with the government--my salary is posted on the internet for the whole world to see, as are all my co-workers'. What's the big deal?

Interesting--thanks for the replies!

We will be getting a new dam gate almost three times as high as an old one we already have on another dam. The detail we use to seal the existing gate on each side (where it meets the steel gain in the pier) is a stainless steel seal tube attached to the gate (hanging vertically from a chain)...

Female here, been working as an engineer for 24 years. I'm a naturally nerdly type who enjoys crunching numbers all day. FWIW, I've not encountered any discrimination based on my sex. Boys and girls are different; men and women are different. Not overwhelmingly different, but different...

1gibson - I just don't like the idea of a VFD outdoors with -30 to +30 C conditions and no control on relative humidity. Others have warned me away from them for this application, and I take their experience into consideration. Have you had problems with fluid couplings or similar that make...

Resolving any problems found during an inspection need not necessarily be expensive---maybe they just need to hold 2 services on Christmas Eve and spread out the congregation a bit? Lots of churches do, e.g. on Christmas Eve my parish has a 4:30 PM, 7:30 PM and Midnight Mass.

We certainly plan on repairing the damaged gears and the bearings. But the whole machine is old, and even AFTER the repair I want to be more gentle on the gears. The electrical arrangements have been changed over the years in order to allow operation by 2 instead of 3 operators---the...

Electricpete - the V-belts probably do provide some softening, but not enough as evidenced by the large numbers of gear teeth with chips out of them! Loosening the belts is a good idea for the interim, certainly---and thanks for the idea.

Hey, I'm still using v. 4.0 (!!!). It does all I need it to do except print clearly--it's legible, but ugly. Was thinking of upgrading, but after this thread decided not to.

I want to provide a more gentle start to a machine via some type of fluid coupling or other mechanical soft start mechanism in order to protect the gear train "downstream" of a motor from torque shocks. The machine is a stoplog lifting crane on a dam. The mechanism, although sheltered from...

First, I heartily endorse the call above for good writing skills. Young engineers need to know that they will be part of a whole team of people, some technical and others not. The ability to transmit technical information to a non-technical audience is critical. But good technical writing...

We do less and less in-house design and are using more and more consultants all the time. (So instead of having 15 design engineers and drafting people we "save money" by have 3 engineers and 50 project managers to do the same or less work---but I digress). For the very little in-house design...

It's a stoplog lifter on a dam. Prime mover is a 15 hp 875 RPM electric motor. Power goes to two mirror-image gear trains (so each get 7.5 hp). System is reversible and operates a roughly equal amount of time in either direction (log up, log down). Thanks to all for the further discussion...

FWIW, I got my license 9 years out of school. I deliberately waited because I did not feel I had the right experience until then. I figured if I was holding myself out as a fully-qualified professional I wanted to make sure that I really WAS one.

metengr, Thanks---much appreciated.

Good hints, thanks all. Note: Failure of the machine could mean liability for flooding a whole lot of private property. Not sure of the cost of that, but there would be more than a few zeros on the end of the number, I'm sure. The more lawyers the more zeroes. If replacement gears are...