Home Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Dirty Little Tricks

Just read a post between Elevatorfella and Scott D. Scott pointed out that a diode was clipped for a DMC battery backup. That's a new one for me. I've only found clear tape on the battery. A friend call two weeks ago and asked if I've heard about board damaged threw the phone line on a 330a? These are the tactics of some interesting people...

So my question is what "dirty little trick" have you had to uncover!

Had a Westink-house hydro that would leak at the packing-every packing we would put in would leak-we could not find the source that was slicing the packing. We found that someone had "dimpled" the piston with a center punch with the car on the stop ring. Of course when you emory the piston before a packing change you don't usually stop ring it

2 one foot long peices of 3/4 conduit with 3 foot of 1/8 inch air cord crosbyed between them. One in the car one in the hall. Not very creative but very destructive.

Heard a story of someone tying a piece of string on a ball valve handle in the pit, manually lowering the car onto buffer springs, then pulling the string, closing the ball valve....very dirty trick on my opinion

WOW that's some dirty Crap!

On a TAC20 type D26=1 then write then change D26=0 but don't write and then wait for power flash or controller reset, the doors will be disconnected and without IMS or a UIT your hosed.

I had a guy from Schindler come in and wipe all pots on a bank of Goldflytes that his company lost. Shut down the bank which were the only surgery floor elevators. The heart patient didn't make it to surgery. The lowlife was charged and hopefully is still in jail. This is the only industry that I know of that has this problem. I have succesfully prosecuted many sabotages. These can be considered felonies in some areas and can ruin good lives and careers. Your company will not help you even if they said to do it. Don't drink the Kool-Aid, if you are skilled at this trade you will always have a job. Sorry for the soap box rant but this is one area that is an absolute waste of time in our industry. It is commonplace in NYC, but I guess that surprises no one. . I could give you a list of about two pages on sabotages that I fixed in the last year alone.

One of the better ones I've seen, in the olden days.

I had a job, we had recently taken over, that was blowing fuses in different areas of the controller. After much troubleshooting found a straight pin had been driven through the traveling cable.

And yes..I've seen worse than that as well.

here is one for the Kone guys in NYC. They like to switch the up normal and down normal cigar switches on the top of car and then use the e brake to drift the car up into the overhead.

Not really a trick but dirty.. picked up 2 Westinghouse ERL cars and on one cars all 4 regulator fuses were jumped, had the wires off the fuse holders andtwisted together with wire nuts. The other car, if you put it on inspection would take off and run by itself only when the other car made a run on automatic .... when the salesman and super surveyed the job they said "I've seen worse". Luckily nobody got hurt.

And the most common one that is against ANSI code, but is done on a regular basis.

Removal of the prints from the job. All I can say to that is...

WTF!!!

Troubleshooting from a generic print never seems to work out good for me.

Just looked at a DMC-1A yesterday. And the prints are missing from the machine room. And who would you imagine is the current service provider! I spoke with the operations Manager, he is looking to see if they have a copy...

Most elevator guys are aware of the paper trick on the old potter brumfield relays, the residual magnetism can cause some havok. Most of my jobs have paper. Beats the hell out of replacing them all!

Fuji
Change software to disable diagnostics upon leaving the job.

Kone.
Changing a bit in LCE to turn off display.

Schindler and TK..
Old stuff Miconic V and T3, T4 type stuff.
Changing passwords on the diagnostics as they walk out.

I can remember a time when you found out you were going to lose a job you FIXED all nagging issues, and lost the job looking brand new. Your reputation was at stake.

Now days the new thinking is to leave as many problems as you can, and sabotage the equipment on the way out the door.

What Happened????

Funny you mentioned that last part. When my company lost a job that my account was linked to, my apprentice and I went through the equipment, cleaned the hoist way and pit, and painted the machine room floor.

It ran flawlessly for 8 weeks. Then, upon the first breakdown, accusations flew that there was sabotage involved. I just shook my head. Sometimes you can't win.

During our 9 month strike in 1972, there were a couple of traveling cables tied to the pit steel on the jobs the "others" were repairing our elevators. and also the old pin in the travelers.

strikes are different from losing and acquiring contract.

took over a tk unit, the week before they left unit they replaced all the vics in the pit and the packing. after a week of having the contract there was a noise in the pit and the customer was all over us I was in the pit for hour trying to figure it out finally i just set the car on jacks and poped of the vics and in a 5 foot section of pipe there was a 3 foot of 3/4 conduit pipe.

I hear ya..
It's like the unit that has been down for a while. You go over and fix it. It goes down a year later, and then you get the call.

"Your Elevator is broke again.".

i had a great one...well no so great. just took over 6 old traction
elevators, was getting the job cleaned up and the guy with me was going over the machines. He emptied the machine drips, someone put some nuts and bolts in the drip pan and he dumped them into the gearbox!! after that we dumped into a bucket to find that 4 of the 6 had nuts and bolts in the pans. no damage was done and we drained and cleaned the gearbox.