Payday Update
— Posted by Brent on March 7, 2006
As I write this the bull wheel/planetary assembly from Payday is being loaded on a truck in our First Time parking lot. It will be taken to Doppelmayr/CTEC in Salt Lake where we will do the repairs. The parts from McConkeys have been installed in Payday and the boys are installing the rope. We are still on schedule for a Wednesday opening of Payday, if all continues to go well.
The planetary I refer to is attached to the bull wheel and you will see the rotating end of it at the top of the lift. The soffit hides the bull wheel but the planetary actually extends through the soffit. The one on Silverlode last year had a ring gear inside it that had broken, which caused the main housing to crack and deform. The planetary from Payday hasn't been opened up yet but the housing is cracked. This leads us to believe it is a repeat of the Silverlode problem. This planetary was opened up last summer and non destructive testing (NDT) was done on the parts inside. There were no problems and that makes this failure even more perplexing.
McConkeys: two complete assemblies of the planetary have been located in Europe. They are both different configurations than ours but we could use the parts from both to get ours back up. These planetarys have been manufactured for other customers. We hope these customers are willing to help us out.
Our lift maintenance crew gets our highest praise for the professional job they do each and every day. When we have a failure such as this they shine even brighter. It can be so disheartening for them when they have done everything in their power to keep our lifts running and then have failures of this type that are beyond their control.
While I applaud the maintenance crews' quick action, but for those of us who have planned our ski vaction during this week this is not what we expect from a world class ski resort. On Sunday you had 1/3 of the mountain closed down while roping people off the lift. This was understandable, but to continue to charge full ticket rates while a major portion of the mountain is closed do to maintenance failure is un-acceptable. PC knew of the potential issues and did not have spares on hand is absurd, especially when there was a plan to replace the equipment at the end of the season. PC needs to be on top of their suppliers. Good thing there are other ski areas in the region.
— Posted by Scott K on March 8, 2006 6:14 PM MST