From local shop to international service provider

Electrical Apparatus, Jun 2008 by Nailen, Richard L

Expanding reach brings company full circle, from motors, to generators, and back to motors again

FARMINGTON, N.M.-When Ben Heikkinen sold his Electrical Machinery & Repair business in Beaumont, Tex., to Reliance Electric in 1979, he planned on private life back in the Rocky Mountain West.

But an acquaintance who was also looking to retire, Wayne England, buttonholed Ben in Colorado and persuaded him to buy the England Electric eight-man shop here in Farmington. (A second purchase, to be "just a hobby" at first, was a 1,000-acre ranch near Durango, Colo.)

The eight employees have now grown to 200, while the firm itself occupies three separate facilities in Farmington (population 43,000), the largest one four times the original size of England Electric.

Eventually, in 2002, Ben sold what had become Industrial Repair Services, Inc., to the Wood Group, an international energy services firm headquartered in Scotland and operating in 46 countries.

Ben and his son Paul-who started with the company as a janitor's assistant before getting his Business Administration degree-led the management team until 2004, when a new president took over from Ben (who is no longer active in the business). Paul stayed on and today is chief technical officer and vice president of sales and marketing.

"They were interested in acquiring us," explained Paul, "because one of their components was involved in gas turbine servicing. They realized that coupled to the turbine shaft there was usually a generator, and outsiders or sometimes competitors would be servicing those. So they went looking for a generator company-came to us, and made an offer." Now known as Wood Group Generator Services (WGGS), Inc., the firm operates as an autonomous subsidiary.

Mechanical beginnings

Long a vocal advocate of mechanical work in the service center, Ben had made his first priority the creation of a major machine shop, beginning with an area of 7,000 square feet, expanded to 13,200 in 1982. The second capability added here was formed coil manufacture. Said Paul: "He wanted the operation to be self-sufficient. He said, 'Let's invest in ourselves instead of paying money to somebody else.'"

A more recent addition to machine shop capability is a 9×10×25 foot gasfired stress relieving oven for work pieces up to 50 tons, used for such items as dragline shafts (as much as 36 tons) and large motor shaft-spider assemblies. Other shop capabilities include heavy fabrication using all types of welding, with a positioner holding up to 60,000 pounds.

Damaged shaft journals are repaired in-house by welding, metal spray, or electroplating. Babbitt bearings are relined using both static pour and spincast (up to 14 inch diameter) methods. A separate CNC machine tool facility produces small precision parts for inshop repair work and for outside customers. A recent example: acid-spray nozzles for an Arizona copper smelter.

Today, Paul Heikkinen added, "We've come full circle in our evolution. When we started, it was strictly motors. Gradually we went from 1,000 horsepower being a large motor to 1,000 horsepower as a small motor. The generator business went from local, regional, to national and international-that was our primary focus for a time.

"Now, we're at a point where that business is extremely cyclical. Most of the work comes during power plant scheduled outage periods in spring and fall, maybe two months at a time. Otherwise the only generator work comes from an occasional forced outage. To smooth out that cycle, we've needed to get back to motors. So, last year we made major investments to present ourselves as a premier motor repair facility."

Large machines

One of those investments was a 14-foot VPI tank, 14 feet deep, capable of deep vacuum at 0.5 Torr. The other was an expanded motor test capability, up to 2,000 kVA at 13,800 volts.

Largest motor worked on here has been a 10,000 hp 6,600 volt induction machine. Largest generator, expected last month, was to be a 50 megawatt 2 pole 18.8 k V unit. Asked if all incoming apparatus condition was recorded in photos, Heikkinen replied, "Yes, and we're thankful for digital cameras!"

Far from rail, water, or interstate highway transportation, Farmington may seem an unlikely location for an operation like this. "That wasn't so much true in the beginning," Heikkinen said. "There was a lot of heavy industry around here. Besides coal, oil, and gas, the uranium mines were going great then. And we started making connections with utilities, out to the East and West coasts. The power plants aren't as thick in the Rocky Mountain states, but now we're looking more closely at that. Altogether, our business grew 40% last year. We're doing a lot of root cause failure analysis."

The WGGS customer base is broad-about 25% in the Western U.S.; 25%-30% in the Northeast; 15% in the Southeast and Gulf Coast. Significant business comes from elsewhere in the Americas (recent examples: rewind of a 113 mVA turbo rotor for a utility in Uruguay, and rebuild of a 143 mVA rotor from the Dominican Republic).