That old hospital in St. Louis with the 1940s Otis still running...

I was doing a mod job there last fall and saw how those old relays worked perfectly for 70 years compared to the board swaps I do now. Anyone else feel like the older stuff was built tougher than what we install today?

2 comments

2 Comments

wells.morgan1mo ago

Yeah but those old relays needed constant tuning and new brushes. Not exactly "no maintenance" like everyone pretends.

dylan_green581mo ago

Man you're not wrong at all. Brushes wore down after like a couple hundred hours of run time. And good luck finding the right spring tension after someone already messed with it. My question is this - were these things ever actually "reliable" in the field, or did we just put up with them because there was no better option? Because from what I've seen working on old gensets, the points gap would drift after a couple heat cycles and you'd be chasing timing issues. Feels like half the nostalgia for these things is just remembering the ones that happened to run okay before they broke.