Colley Elevator is an independent elevator maintenance, service, new construction & modernization company in the Chicagoland area.
Colley Elevator completes a lot of cylinder replacement projects. Each project is unique, each project takes a team to complete. This particular project is one that took a team of 12 from start to finish to complete.
We got a phone call from a building owner indicating he had gotten our phone number from a retired elevator inspector and asked if we did elevator cylinder work. We told him, yes we do, we do more cylinder work than any other company in the Chicago area. We made a time to visit the building and the elevator was shut down and locked out and on pipe stands. The sales person went out and after initial review there was some signs that this could have been a false positive because of a few things. The last thing we want to do is replace a cylinder that was misdiagnosed. We had a free service team in the area and they came over, did some diligence and retested the cylinder and indeed the incumbent company was correct, it was a cylinder leak. No charge to the building, something we like to do just to be 100% we have a leak.
It took a few weeks for the building to decide who to work with, they ended up working with Colley. We had the measurements from our first visit so we were able to order everything right away. The cylinder took about 4-5 weeks to get. When we found out it was actually going to ship, we pulled the cylinder out. While the cylinder was being pulled out the new cylinder & piston hit the dock, we prepared it with a tape coat wrap for extra protection.
When the cylinder came out the hole did not look promising. The hole backfilled on itself and we only had a 7” diameter hole. We notified the building owner that this did not look good and prepare the building for a well driller. But! First we were going to give it our best shot. We bought a cylinder bag instead of using rigid PVC, we scheduled the debris removal truck, we scheduled the welder to be there the same day. Good news! Debris removal truck got us a 24” diameter hole and welder zipped it up, we pretested the welds[not too many companies still pretest welds, we believe this is very important before it gets buried.] and plumbed the cylinder. A few days later, we are back filled, the piston is in and car is unhung.
Equipment providers
Cylinder - Elevator Equipment Corporation EECO
Shut off valve - Maxton
While the building owner sees or talks to 3 or 4 people from Colley behind the scenes there was 12 people who worked on this project in one form or another. Without each person doing their part of the project it would not have been a success. From top to bottom this was a complete team effort! Project team kicked tail! A win for the building! A win for Colley! Good work everyone!
Hey! Sign up for our mailing list! Each month you will get some great info on Colley! It is short and quick to run through, you’ll like it!
If you have any questions or would like additional information feel free to contact me at CraigZ@colleyelevator.com or 630-766-7230 ext. 107 or on our web page at www.colleyelevator.com
This is another building we did an incredible modernization project on that improved the reliability of the elevator system. We had been talking to the building about equipment replacement since we took over the account 2012 to start giving them a chance to budget for this major project.
Existing elevator & project scope – The existing equipment in the building where Montgomery Mi Prom 7 story hydraulic elevators. In Des Plaines, IL there are a lot of MiProms and a lot of US Elevators. Neither MiProm or the US Elevator are user friendly controller, unless you are a Montgomery or US elevator mechanic that grew up on these. The good news is that a lot of the existing control systems are to a point where they are getting replaced.
New equipment providers
Controllers
– Smartrise Engineering
Power
units – MEI
Door
operators – GAL MOVFR II w/MAC car and hatch door equipment
Fixtures
– Innovation Industries
Hydraulic elevator
controller
– The original controllers have been through a lot including undersized original
mainline disconnect wiring and very hot machine rooms. Look at the difference in how many wires and
boards from the old Miprom control system to the new Smartrise system.
Hydraulic elevator
power unit
– The old Montgomery power unit was wearing and experiencing fatigue. It also was leaking a decent amount. This replacement was part of phase I which occurred
a few years prior.
Door operators – The elevator had MAC
operator and equipment. We replaced the
operator with a GAL MOVFR and replaced the existing MAC equipment with new to
reduce some of the expense with replacing with all GAL.
Elevator fixtures – The old Montgomery fixtures went away and new Innovation flush mount fixtures to meet ADA and elevator code requirements were installed. Originally there was only 1 button stack so we put the new button stack on the other elevator to eliminate any downtime. We also combined the directional arrow with a position indicator because the original man lobby fixture was already busy with all the devices, when adding the emergency communication, it became challenging to make everything fit.
Take away – The big take away for this project was that a building planned for many years to do the project. We started working with the building in 2015 on budgets and phasing. We broke this project up into 3 phases many years ago; power units & soft starts, door operators and finally the control and operating system. Eventually we decided to wait to complete phase 2 and 3 together and kept the cars running an additional year so it could all be done at the same time.
Hey! Sign up for our mailing list! Each month you will get
some great info on Colley! It is short
and quick to run through, you’ll like it!
If
you have any questions or would like additional information feel free to
contact me at CraigZ@colleyelevator.com or
630-766-7230 ext. 107 or on our web page at www.colleyelevator.com
Also
check us out on Instagram @Colleyelevator see what we have been up to.
