Steel Mill Bed Rail Portable Machining
Steel mill bed rail portable machining is one of FSM's many steel mill on-site machining competencies. Field System Machining has performed steel mill machinery repair, steel mill turnaround and steel mill outage work since 1978, and we are getting pretty good at it.
If the above isn't a rigid setup, I've never seen one. The milling involved machining from the top faces 9/16” and from the vertical inside faces, 1/2" material on all three pinion stands, for installation of new pre fabricated “L” liners. In total 3 sets of bed rails were machined. Note the ubiquitous beverage container on top of the milling machine--It has become an unspoken FSM machinist tradition to capture a beverage container in a job progress photo.
Here you can see that we are preparing to set our equipment. Some of our men prefer working in power plants because there are no deep greasy pits to wade around in while machining and setting up, as there are in steel mills. Some of our men don't care for power plant work, due to the ever present but invisible particulates on the turbine deck. They each have their strengths and drawbacks. Whichever you prefer, in place machining gets into your blood. Your aural and olfactory sensstions spike your adrenaline when you walk into a steel mill and hear the noise and smell the mixture of grease and steel power.
Drill baby, drill; Drill those liners! In addition to machining the horizontal and angled rail beds for acceptance of the liners, we also drilled, tapped and installed the liners into our newly machined rail beds.
The machine has been set on the new rail liners, and it is time for Field System Machining to return to beautiful downtown South Elgin, Illinois, after another successful steel mill outage.