ABB, co-host of the 2007 Factory Tour at Finepoint's Circuit Breaker Conference, offers more than high-end breaker manufacturing at its Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania facility. The facility also serves as headquarters for the High-Voltage Service group.

ABB’s service support includes a full-capabilities service shop, parts service, field services, and engineering and consulting. Finepoint participants will tour
both the new DTB factory and the service shop while participating in
interactive technology presentations.

The service shop does remanufacturing and rebuilds, new testing, and prototyping, according to Bart Gaskey, marketing manager for ABB’s High-Voltage Aftermarket Services Group. “One of the biggest programs is our mechanism exchange. Westinghouse made the bulk of the circuit breakers back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, (as well as GE). Since we have the parts and expertise from Westinghouse, we can provide a virtually brand new, or remanufactured mechanism,” he said.

“We took all the parts, we stripped them down, we sandblasted them, we checked dimensions and tolerances, we kept what was still good, we replated it, we reassembled, put new bearings, new switches. We put all those things in and put it back together and tested it, so you have better than new because we used all the tricks and technology improvements we learned over the years,” Gaskey said.

The complete line of ABB circuit breaker and GIS legacy brands (ABB, Asea, BBC, ITE, and Westinghouse) continue to be actively supported through the High-Voltage Service group. The service group boasts the industry's largest available parts inventory located within its Greensburg, Pennsylvania, service shop.

“We have $20 million in inventory of parts that go back to 1913,” Gaskey said. “Most times we will have the parts customers need and we can overnight them—or they sometimes receive them the same day.”

Gaskey said that customers can call and describe their problem and ABB engineers will research what parts are needed. “We have dedicated parts research people that dig through the archives. Customers don’t have time to do all that.”

ABB’s field services group includes more than 20 qualified and trained field engineers. Some are strategically located around the United States, and they service the majority of ABB’s “installed base.” They can coordinate parts and equipment needs with the company.

The engineering and consulting group performs maintenance, fleet health screening and risk assessments. They will look at the maintenance data and age of the equipment and make recommendations to optimize the reliability of the system.

“We have expertise still resident from Westinghouse and ITE in the engineering group,” Gaskey said.

The Factory Day will be held on Oct. 2, 2007. See http://www.circuitbreakerconference.com for more information