TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --
No one in the 551st Commodities Maintenance Squadron boom
shop ever looked forward to “stabbing the telescoping boom.”
That’s what the shop calls the physically demanding job of
inserting an approximately 25-foot cylindrical tube inside a 29-foot-long
KC-135 aerial refueling tanker boom in the shop.
It’s kind of like inserting a long metal straw inside a
slightly larger metal straw, but the “straw” weighs about 300 pounds.
It required two maintainers to lift the heavy tube in
tandem and horizontally try to finesse it into the mouth of the boom. The work
was grueling, injury-prone and often had mechanics needing to stretch before
doing it. The tube also has an important electric wire dangling out of its end,
too.
“The process is awkward because you can’t damage the
wire,” aircraft mechanic Travis Saylor said, “and you have to set it in there
about 18 inches to get it on a chain guard inside the boom. The reason you had
to do it manually is the angle on the boom just made it difficult.
“It’s a task everybody hated. We all dreaded when it came
time to stab the boom.”
The old way is no more, however, thanks to an idea and
three groups applying their skills to build a better and safer way to get the
job done.
Mr. Saylor, one of the mechanics who handles some of the
shop’s average of seven boom/tube insertions a month, had the start of an idea
to make the job a lot easier. He and Joe Harder, an aircraft sheet metal mechanic,
talked about creating a fixture from condemned parts and consulted with the
Integrated Design Team, Rick Meese, Joseph Milton and Chris Stulken.
The Integrated Design Team of the Voluntary Protection
Program took a few items from the condemned pile and came up with a fixture
that would level the tube, with ball rollers to help it slide in.
Mr. Meese, VPP IDT supervisor representative, and Mr. Milton,
a VPP IDT employee representative, took the idea to members of the 550th
Commodities Maintenance Group machine shop. The two men and Mr. Stulken, a
union counterpart on the CMXG VPP design team, are tasked with injury reduction
for the base’s commodities organizations.
The machine shop used a condemned metal KC-135 part called
a forward fitting pivot fork, added ball rollers to it, and it now acts as an
insertion point and allows the tube to easily slide into the boom.
The new method only needs one mechanic using an electric
hoist to lift the tube and insert it, with far less physical exertion. The old
two-person insertion method had been in place for two or three decades,
mechanics said.
“With Travis’s idea, we just took it and modified it to
where, using existing parts, it would fit on the boom housing,” Mr. Meese said.
“We basically just had to fine tune and get everything adjusted where it fit
perfectly.
“The cool thing about this project is other than labor,
we’ve got $50 in the whole thing. So that’s a big savings. The whole deal is
with these rollers you’ve basically taken lifting out of this whole process. It
just slides right in.”
Mr. Saylor said he appreciated another aspect of the
impromptu project: its speed. The team members took about a month to test,
refine and approve the new device.
“They were great and very quick,” Mr. Saylor said. “It
fits perfectly and takes all the work out of it.”
Maintainers also involved in creating the fixture included
Ryan Adkins, 550th CMMXS/MXDPAAR; Roger Holder, 550th CMMXS/MXDPAA, Ryan
Kilgore, 550th CMMXS/MXDPAA; and Marvin Walker, 550th CMMXS/MXDPAA.