The Jarvis hydroelectric plant, located on Hinkley reservoir in NY State has two Dominion Bridge-Sulzer turbines. I was an engineer at this site during construction, which was 1985-86. Dominion Bridge, in the Lachine shops, built the turbines to a Bell or Sulzer design. The turbines were a challenge. They were an "S" type turbine, being double-regulated (Kaplan) style. The runners used a "Bestobell" seal, made in England. The logic controls came from Escher Wyss. The inlet butterfly valves were Bailey-Hogoovens, made in Holland, with German gear drives for the valve operation. The vendors who made parts on those units came from all over Europe and the UK. I joked that we had every thread system represented on those units- British Whitworth machine threads, British straight and taper pipe, metric threads, and US Unified National Form threads and NPT pipe threads. The hydraulic system to work the wicket gates and ptch blades was even more varied with metric and inch tubing sizes and a variety of fitting connection systems.
We had two erecting engineers from the turbine builders on the job- one was from Roumania, and the other was French Canadian. Not only could we hardly understand either of them, they could hardly understand each other. We had one Canadian erecting engineer who came out for part of the project. He was original, with Dominion Bridge before they got into the building of the hydro turbines for other firms.
The plate steel casings, main shafts and some of the other parts were made in the Dominion Bridge shops.
At the time we were working on the construction and startup at Jarvis/Hinkley, the same erecting engineers were commissioning another Dominion-Bridge/Sulzer unit in Dolgeville, NY.
The generators on those units came out of the West Allis, WI shops of Siemens-Allis. They were supposed to be the last synchronous generators to come out of the West Allis shops as Siemens relocated to Florida.
We commissioned those units at the end of December, 1985, and it was some time after before all the bugs were worked out. I recall the Dominion Bridge plate and machine work on the shafts, turbine casings, draft tubes and gate rings all was well done. At the time that the job was awarded to Dominion-Bridge/Sulzer, I had some misgivings We'd had some nasty experiences with some Brown-Boveri/Voest Alpine hydro turbines at another site where nothing fit together. It was the same sort of arrangement, where Brown Boveri and Voest "shopped" the building of the turbines and generators to a variety of vendors. In that case, nothing fit and the design was cheap and had problems from the git go. It was a continuing mess of field changes and rework with the Brown-Boveri/Voest Alpine units. The Dominion Bridge units were well designed and well made. Admittedly, they had problems with the Bestobell seals and some minor issues, but overall, everthing went together right.
In the past 20 years or so, Lachine became the place to send hydro turbine generator winding jobs and machine work. G.E. has a large shop there. I wonder if this was part of the Dominion Bridge facility ?
Joe Michaels
