Intern 5.0: 3/9-3/20 Catching Up

I missed last weeks blog post, so you are in luck! A double feature is now showing here!

The first week which would be 9th-13th was a pretty straight forward week. At my internship I did more annual maintenance on lawn equipment. At school I was able to fabricate a new engine hook for one of the engines at school. It was actually a lot of fun and gave me an excuse to use the acetylene torch. I cut an approximate 11" of 3/8x4" steel, constituting a "0" bit for my torch. I set the torch to 15-20 O2 and 3-5 for my acetylene. After cutting and drilling my steel I gave it a sleek flat black paint job to give it that clean cut look.

The old one was looking kind of... sketchy.

Flat black does wonders.

Looks clean cut now.

The second week I learned about vacuum and pressure testing on the fire engine pumps at the shop. By shutting all of the discharge valves and running the primer pump with no water we were able to create a vacuum in the pump, we then observed the gauge to note any significant loss in vacuum pressure. We then pressurized the system with shop air while covering the discharge ports with latex gloves to see if any air was escaping. Once we completed these tests we concluded that the pump packing needed to be replaced and set about taking the old packing out. To take out the old packing we took the plungers out and pressurized the system by flowing water from a secondary tender (T63) to the engine 70's intake/suction port. As the pressure built to about 170psi in the 2 1/2" hose, it forced the old pump packing to be blasted out.