Sunday, February 8, 2026

Elevator Picture Hall of Fame 2026 – Superbowl of Elevators

 


The Hall of Fame posts are typically some of the more popular blogs in the Colley blog history. We get to see a lot of elevators during the year on our initial visits for pricing or while engineering projects. Of the hundreds of elevators, and thousands of pictures, these are some of the gems we've seen this past year.

 


Lots of wires – now that we are now involved in internet and phones we need to work with the buildings on getting us a good internet connection.   This is a telecommunication area we were pointed to.

 


Bad packing – This is the state of a cylinder gland packing we found when changing out the seals.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one like this.

 


Alarm Chaos – I have a 4 year old and 7 year old boys, it looks like they where sent here to investigate the fire alarm. 

 


The streets where I’m living – There was/is a band called the NY Citizens and they had a song called “The streets where I’m living”.  I missed the part of the song where they said they installed the street in the elevator pit.

 


Pool party – I coach a girls travel softball team and we wanted to have a pool party but ran out of money.  I got this picture from one of our mechanics and decided we can save some money and have the pool party in the elevator pit.  We did have to pay for shots and antibiotic for after the pool party. 

 


No problem here – From time to time we go to buildings who do not have power outages and find out that they really may have had a power issue.  That or my 4 and 7 year old have been moving wires around on the door operator.

 


I haven’t seen this before – Not sure I’ve seen this solution on a pump/dump before.  It is creative, like putting a tarp on your driveway with a pully system to avoid shoveling. Only to find out when it snows too much you can’t pull the tarp up so you borrow your neighbor’s snowblower.  After you are done snowblowing the tarp and getting it stuck in the snow blower you return it to your neighbor and pretend nothing happened.

 


Too much greenfield – There are other piping options then using greenfield all over the car.  Just say NO!

Disclaimer – We see hundreds and thousands of pictures over the course of a year. While we don’t see as many great pictures of maintained elevators, we do see them, which is fantastic. We have a lot of very dedicated and talented elevator people in our area. The reason we don’t see a lot of buildings getting great elevator service is because they are happy with their mechanic and the mechanic is probably cleaning and taking care of the building. Those buildings are not calling us to get pricing for elevator work because they are being taken care of. Be the great mechanic or helper, don’t be these people. We should all take the time and care we would like to have people who work in our homes to have. Do great things! We have great jobs! We have a great industry! If you are doing great, Keep it up. If you need to improve, no other time than now to start! Lets do 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.