ACES partnered with Bogh Industries, experts in burners, ovens, heat-treat and mechanical engineering, on major design revisions to an oven in Chandler, AZ. This machine is part of a production facility which…
Beating the Heat
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Wiring and Electricity
The Case of the Shy Burner
A VFD swap caused an oven’s burner to stop lighting. Control Systems Inspector traced the wiring and found something unexpected. One of ACES’ clients called with an oven that suddenly wouldn’t light. This is a mission-critical industrial oven in a food…
The Case of the Cold Oven
One of ACES customers is a fine food producer with 20 facilities across the US and Mexico. One of the ovens they used for final processing had always been finicky and difficult to start, with a startup routine of 12 seconds, so they asked ACES to modify…
The Case of the Overheating Drum Welder
THE MYSTERY An ACES’ CSI (Control Systems Investigator) was called to the scene of an overheating side-seam drum welder. This is a primary machine for this customer, a barrel manufacturer. Its job is to take a flat piece of metal, roll it into a hoop and weld it down…
The Case of the Glitchy Helium Tester
THE MYSTERY One of ACES’ customers manufactures drums and containers for industrial uses. They called us due to an issue with their helium tester, a machine which injects the gas into newly manufactured barrels, seals them and raises them into a vacuum chamber to be…
The Case of the Dead Dryer Drum
THE MYSTERY A correctional facility was having problems with one of their industrial, horizontal-running dryers. The Case of the dead dryer drum. The dryer drum refused to budge. The customer had pressed the reset button with no effect, so they called in the experts…
The Case of the Crashing Bead Expander
A manufacturer of industrial packaging systems such as barrels and drums owned a bead expander that kept faulting. The ACES’ CSI (Control Systems Operator) initially worked with the customer over the phone to identify a bad motion card as the likely…
The Case of the Dead Lift Station
There was a power outage at a municipal waste water collection system, which left a lift station dead in the water. The station wouldn’t run on generator power, and once regular power resumed the station wouldn’t come to life in auto or bypass mode either,…
The Case of the Fault-Heavy Weigher
THE MYSTERY An ACES customer manufactures tortilla chips, using a 30-year-old multi-hopper weigher to measure chips for bagging. The machine was faulting and the customer had worked with factory tech support to troubleshoot it themselves, but after replacing $12,000…
The Case of the Ripped-Up Paper Machine
THE MYSTERY A packaging manufacturing company called ACES as one of their paper machines had broken two felts in short order. The felt is a strip that carries the paper pulp, threading it through a long and complex series of rollers to squeeze out the water. The…