Last night I managed to get to bed on time, though I was really tired.  I got up on time this morning but hit the snooze alarm a couple of times so I got downstairs a little later than normal.  I still had time to chat with Laila and all and got out of the house and to work on time, but I was still dragging a bit today.  I always feel this way by Friday as I get older.

My class finished their lab early so I went down to the 400 Hz generator room to help ET1 Kelly try and repair the generators so we could get the class back on schedule.  He had one of them up after cleaning it really good.  I guess they haven't been being maintained because no one wanted to take responsibility for them. 

The other one was giving him problems.  He had identified 2 possibly bad circuit cards and was still getting bad readings on the front panel.  The L1 and L2 windings to ground were reading low while the L3 winding was reading good.  The L1-L2, L2-L3, and the L1-L3 were reading good.  That told me the output should be good and that maybe something was wrong with the voltage sensors.  I had him tap on them and spray them with compressed air and when he did that they started reading a bit higher but were still low. 

We then went ahead and shut it down and hooked up a multimeter to the voltage outputs to ground.  I had him shut it down when hooking up the meter because we were unsure of how much current would be present and I didn't want him to get electrocuted.  When we measured the voltages they were perfect, so all we had was some bad front panel indications from the sensors. 

We then went ahead and checked out the 2 possibly bad circuit cards and got it down to 1 bad card.  Currently the 2M soldering folks are testing it out on the Huntron tracker to see if they can repair the card. 

So now everyone is happy and it will give Kelly something to put in his evaluation.  It is really more impressive to the chain of command because public works couldn't or wouldn't take a look at it and they were not able to contract it out.  If the 2M folks can get it down to a component it will really be great because he will have repaired it at a cost of just over $100, which was the cost of the technical manual.  Seeing as how the faulty component is most likely a diode or transistor, repairs to the card will be cheap, probably less than $5.  Even if it is an IC chip the cost will still be small.

So now we can get everything back on schedule and that is a good feeling.  If we could not have gotten it fixed it would have been nearly impossible to teach the antenna area.  So now I am ready for a well deserved three day weekend though I do have to do some grocery shopping on the way.  I hope everyone has a great few days off.