Had some interesting experience today of destructive engineering for testing and analysis purposes. Due to the work done in New Caledonia in regards to the failed cable joints, we wanted to now split open and examine in detail the "perfect" made joints done by the Australian joints that I had previously mentioned and photographed here.
I got to see how the Filipino workers did it in New Caledonia, with a nine-inch angle grinder and pliers/screwdrivers. We tried to emulate that using a smaller four-inch angle grinder, a few chisels and a hammer. It was pretty darn difficult.
While I could go into a lot more detail into how it went, lets say there was a lot of sweat, some blood, lots of highly toxic epoxy dust, cursing, and much electricity used to crack open and extradite the three phases inside. The jointer who came to open them up needed our help to do it, definitely not a single person job for sure, and while he was the one that made it, he said that he had never taken one apart because quite simply, it just wasn't ever done.
The epoxy shell is designed to withstand backhoe damage when digging, so opening them with hand tools is quite a challenge indeed....
Anyway, the job was done, and I had to wash a lot of powder off me and dust off quite vigourously afterwards.....
Now we are just waiting for a company to get back to us for X-ray work to be done on the phases we separated out.
I got to see how the Filipino workers did it in New Caledonia, with a nine-inch angle grinder and pliers/screwdrivers. We tried to emulate that using a smaller four-inch angle grinder, a few chisels and a hammer. It was pretty darn difficult.
While I could go into a lot more detail into how it went, lets say there was a lot of sweat, some blood, lots of highly toxic epoxy dust, cursing, and much electricity used to crack open and extradite the three phases inside. The jointer who came to open them up needed our help to do it, definitely not a single person job for sure, and while he was the one that made it, he said that he had never taken one apart because quite simply, it just wasn't ever done.
The epoxy shell is designed to withstand backhoe damage when digging, so opening them with hand tools is quite a challenge indeed....
Anyway, the job was done, and I had to wash a lot of powder off me and dust off quite vigourously afterwards.....
Now we are just waiting for a company to get back to us for X-ray work to be done on the phases we separated out.
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