March 22, 2005: West Pylon
Final injection of cable terminations
It all starts at the top - heating 55 gallon drums of wax to about 120
C and requiring 24 hours of heating.
Its a rather big job requiring 32 drums per tower (West and East) or
1760 gallons of wax for the top anchorages of one tower.
Here you can see the heating coils that have been working overtime since
yesterday in order to convert solid wax into liquid wax.
Left is a view of cold wax while on the right is hot wax, ready for pumping
Here is the pump for passing the wax to the cable-stay stations below.
The delivery hose is 155 feet long and imagine what happens when there is
an internal block. Makes keeping coronary arteries clean seem pretty simple.
But for homework, think about how to finish each day - primarily flushing
the delivery tube so that when it cools, there is no wax inside to create
an obstacle.
Here the bundle of strands is capped.
The copper pipe at the top allows displaced air from inside
the cap to escape. The lower snap-on connection is for attaching the
wax delivery pipe. Crescencio is patiently waiting for the wax to start flowing.
Prior to injecting the wax, the stuffing box for each anchorage is closed
in order to prevent any leakage into the stay pipe.
and so we wait while approximately 100 L (depending on the number of
strands in the cable) of wax is delivered.
When all is finished, the air pipe and injection point are removed and
capped.