Since I got home from WAIS a few weeks back I have been working on our NPOESS crew running 3” and 4” Ridged conduit for NASA. Running ridged conduit is hard, but interesting work. I had run some ridged in the past, but hadn’t worked a whole lot with some of the bigger stuff until now. There is a lot of math involved in the bending and unlike working with EMT, each piece really has to be planned out ahead of time and bent to an exact degree in order to make everything screw together properly. The journeyman in charge of our crew does have a lot of experience, so it has been nice to be able to work on the project and to have the opportunity to learn some new job skills. 
NPOESS is short for National Polar Orbital Environmental Satellite System, and we have been running the power for a new satellite that is supposed to be put in next year. It is my understanding that the satellites are used to monitor and study climate and weather. So between the four of us, we have ran several hundred feet of ridged within the last couple of weeks. All of the work is on top of a ridge and it is extremely cold, windy, and basically miserable about 99% of the time. By the end of the day I am usually covered in oil, wind burned, sun burned, sand blasted, frozen, and exhausted from carrying around and spinning on 100lb sticks of conduit….the joys of Antarctica! We are just finishing up however, and it is now time to pull wire, which hopefully will go smoothly tomorrow. Although it has been hard work, it makes for the days to go by faster and it is pretty cool to be able to work on another project that is going to be used for science.
No comments:
Post a Comment