Dirty Job, but I enjoyed it!

So yesterday I had to go and clean out a Drummenloader. What you see in the first picture is a giant barrel of glue. A large plate is pushed into the glue and melts what it needs prior to pumping. A melt-on demand system if you will. Very cool system, but in my opinion the worse type of glue to deal with. The glue being used is a PUR(polyurethane reactant), its curing is activated by the moisture in the air. After it has cured it is very hard to get molten again. This exact function is needed for this company since they are using the glue to make fire doors.

The fun begins! We pulled the plate out of the glue and got it down to an easier working level.

I pulled the gear pump off and right away could see that this system was overdue for a cleaning. You can see at the bottom of the pump the chared glue with the orange colour compared with the glue on the outlet which is white. No wonder it was having trouble pumping with such a restriction.

Finally, into the internals of the melting plate. Unplugging sensors and heaters temporarily to try to get things out. Did I mention that you have to work on this machinery while it's hot? Kind of hard cleaning cured glue, so this plate was sitting at 230 degrees Celsius. It really sucks when you touch something you weren't supposed to. =P

Those three pictures are the lower half of the pump block. You can see that there is cured PUR all around the intake channel of the block... again no surprise it wasn't pumping very well.

This is what the pump block should look like.

And lastly, cleaning all the channels on the bottom of the melting plate before putting it back together. This was my 5th time cleaning a system like this.

Nailed it! XD