It’s not really going anywhere with the diagnosis. I wanted to know what the guys – who had obviously already discussed it a lot – had come up with that could fit.
No one was there on Monday. That’s not quite true, only one, but he didn’t need to know where his colleagues were either. It took a while until it was cleared up. One was sick at home, the second was in the bush and so the two who know each other best were not there. So it makes no sense to continue today. By the way, “bush” means 70 km away in the forest where the trees are felled, lopped, cut to length and loaded onto the trucks.
I make better progress with the second group. Everyone is there on time at the beginning. I always start with the material from the previous day to see if it has been understood. Some yes, some no. But on the whole, better than expected.
We talked a lot about electrochemistry, magnetism, batteries and generators. Even though it is tedious, it was necessary in order to then understand the behaviour of the components. In my world it was quite clear that today you only use the better battery types like gel or AGM. But you don’t have those here, just the simple ones with the screw cap to check the acid level. They also have the corresponding old chargers. The very new cars here also have the new batteries, but they are the absolute exception. In addition, some cheap batteries are bought from India/China.
So the problem with the old chargers and new batteries is that the voltage is too high, and therefore the batteries outgas. With the old ones, it’s not so bad, because you can just add distilled water. With the new battery types, there is nothing to refill. Either the hydrogen/oxygen mixture escapes through a valve or the battery explodes. Neither is nice.
I think everyone has now understood that this is not possible, after we have discussed the electrochemical basics of the battery. At least everyone who is in training. The boss hasn’t yet, I still have to explain that to him.
The actual goal of the support I understood after 2 weeks – at least I think. They want to understand how to repair the 3 buses when there is a problem with the electrics. When I spoke to the contractor here on the phone last year, he assured me that he could get the service documents quite easily and everything would be there when I came. That was a big fallacy on my part. The reliability of promises is interpreted somewhat differently here than I had assumed. But that could also be due to the Far Eastern (i.e. Indian) mentality and origin of my colleagues here. Nothing is there, not even an instruction manual, let alone anything about service documents. That’s going to be really difficult. There is something, though, an instruction manual in PDF format for a comparable but 5 years younger bus in Korean. But that doesn’t help much at the moment. The internet doesn’t offer anything either. I had already found the manual in Korean at a Russian server.
#StayTuned
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