Allessandro - lol! Regarding fireworks IN the lift shaft, it would be a challenge to get a rocket to go straight up the shaft without hitting anything though, not that I've tried it!
This channel: about elevators 12:56: _mad dashing down approximately 17 sets of stairs_ 13:22: _puffed out_ Moral: it's good to know your limits. The lift would indeed probably not have been fast enough.
Yees, the lift had left before I got there! I was actually still recovering from an illness I picked up before we went on holiday. Oh yes, and my cursing when running to the fireworks was that I was wearing normal trainers and I had tried to short-cut to the firework area, but found a dead end and had to go back across the snow and ice!! I should have left earlier!!
@@mrmattandmrchay Ouch... ah, double ouch... triple ouch.. Can totally relate to getting disasterously sidetracked/distracted :) hopefully you're feeling better now, and thanks for all the footage you're capturing, it's very informative.
1:04 does that counterweight even have proper tracks at the sides of it or is it just suspended by a few ropes only with not metal supports to keep it in position in terms of rotation??
ZZ9 Productions keep watching and you can see it swaying back and forth a bit. My guess is this is a perfectly fine solution for very small lifts that only hoist a few passengers at a time.
Wow. I love those VFD driven motors. They have such a cool start up sound. Very quiet, but how reliable are they? Also got to love those acordian style doors on the cab. I never seen those on an elevator before. Great video.
Well thanks a lot Mr Matt for sending me down a Schindler rabbit hole for the past 45 minutes...! I thought "Hmm what's that interesting interesting little box on the inside door of the cabinet at 10:00 labelled TM4" and I had a google because I was curious and it turns out that it's a Schindler GSM based telemonitoring device, so it's a good job you weren't tinkering with anything at all in that cabinet. Then I somehow found myself reading the whole Miconic BX controller configuration manual (in French!) where I found that the RS232 port can be connected to a laptop and used with "CADI GC" which seems to be Schindler's config software, or it can also apparently be connected to an iPAQ and operated that way. If there are any working iPAQs left that is! Interestingly it also seems they use CanBUS to connect the car displays and controls to the controller. Suppose 3 wires is better than multicore. Anyway now it's time to go and do the washing up that I intended to start 45 minutes ago! Thanks for another interesting vid :)
What is that little device with the "man standing" sign sitting on top of the circuit board? I've seen that exact device in a motor room of a modernized Schindler lift in my homeland but I couldn't figure it out what it was (I suspect it has something to do with overload, but not sure)
The orange LED illuminates when the lift car is floor level. This device is only operational in handwinding mode or when using the test controls hung at the side of the controller (yellow box with buttons).
Thanks for your video ! Since Schindler modernized an orignal relay lift in an appartment building I lived in, a high-pitched sound similar to the one we can hear in the video can be heard through speakers in the appartments when the lift runs. It seems that current filtering and smoothing isn't something that Schindler consider as being important. So not only has this lift lost much of its personnality, but it has also become very annoying when running while you watch a film or listen to music at low volumes ... Even the LED display flickers a bit. The fixtures and indicators are exactly the same as the one shown in this video. It seems to be cheap electronics ! And in the appartment building I presently live in (built in 2017), the lift is a generic lift from the Compagnie Française des Ascenseurs (CFA), using an OTIS base but with cheap, flimsy, and squeaky cabin materials, doors, etc. If you move in the cabin, it even swings a few centimeters to the left and right, as if the rails were not properly placed and allowed too much horizontal movement. Even some of the LED lighting bulbs die every 6-8 months ! And the best part is that the ground floor doors can't open if you don't push them manually. They are kind of stuck when opening, and the whole lifts shakes. Greasing the door railings didn't do a thing. However they close normally, so I don't know what exactly the problem could be. And, because of this the lift is down for now 1 month and a half and we all have to use the stairs. Schindler, which was chosen to service the lift, do not seem to be wanting to repair the lift as it should have been repaired mid-January ... but it still is shut down. Any idea on this problem ? I'm way too young to have an extensive knowledge of older lifts from the 60 and 70s, but I do not think that lifts were as poorly built.
I have no idea what it is. My guess is that it was the protective plastic around a new part that was changed, probably the top right counterweight guide. It's worked itself loose and keeps going up and down the ropes.
The electrical engineer in me says the motor is not overly happy about the upgrade to a variable speed drive - it shouldn't make that uneven high frequency noise (it should be either quiet or an even sound) it sounds like loose laminations in the rotor.
Interesting comment, wasn't sure if that amount of noise was normal or not. Bearing in mind, most of the audio you can hear is from my Sony camera (over the grill, looking down the shaft) which was right next to the motor!
Sounds pretty good to me, i would say that it was consistent with VF conversions that i have come across from several different manufacturers OTIS. EXPRESS . SCHINDLER and even Marryat & Scott.
Do forgive me for not being a purist or a true believer, but as a budding electronics engineer, I find the electronic control systems, VFDs and whatnot, just as interesting as the old systems. There can be a *lot* going on here, and a VFD is basically pure magic as far as modern technology is concerned. I’d love to get into the nitty gritty of how a modernised lift is controlled. A circuit board may not be that interesting to watch, but a laptop, a bus pirate (or a serial adapter cable) and a JTAG header or whatnot would be VERY interesting to look at! Being your laptop and listen to that serial cable sometime, it might be quite interesting. Disconnect the transmit pin so you don’t inadvertently send something to the controller. We only want to listen. But it might be interesting!
Yep, we have similar controllers where you can connect up hyperterminal. Difficult to tell what interface this is. For Otis, they have a handheld controller. Schindler might have something simular, or this could be a native RS232 connection. I suppose mid-2000s every laptop had a com port, nowadays we have to connect a USB to RS232 adapter. Could also be RS485 which makes things difficult. AHHH, also baud rates, parity bits, stop bits, lol!! Might be a while before anything meaningful come up in hyperterminal! :)
I'm not a lift engineer so take my words with a grain of salt. Motors and generators are very very similar, in that a generator is basically a motors in reverse (using mechanical energy to generate electricity and not the other way around). In alternating current, we define the angular velocity of a generator as w (in reality it's a lowercase omega, but I don't have Greek letters on the keyboard 😅). The frequency of the current generated by that alternator is equal to the angular velocity over 2 times pi, hence the angular velocity is 2 times pi multiplied by the frequency. Now it is clear that manipulating the frequency allows us to deterministically set the angular speed of the motor as long as it doesn't have any "slip" (the magnetic field of the motor is strong enough to keep the rotor in the intended position). I know that you are probably already aware of all of this, but maybe someone else curious about the inner workings of this piece of equipment will find it useful 🙂 More ironic, though, is how many many many generics nowadays have this huge power in their hands, and still use it to implement two speed classic leveling 🤣
I like the fact you can see the windings in the motor. A tidy setup there, but a great shame it's driven by a VFD. I bet it sounded good running on standard 50Hz mains.
Yeah, I wished I'd filmed that for longer or at a different angle, but I didn't see it until I replayed the footage! Remember my lift from 1905 videos? I went there 5 times to get all that footage, 1st visit I noticed when replaying the video which I wanted to go back and see, next visit, same thing, etc!! It's always such a rush when filming and you don't always notice things until you play back the footage.
Been watching your videos for a while, and I still can't figure out why you're in the machine room on a holiday. Either a) you did a little B&E b) you got permission c) you have a key for the rooms somehow or d) you're there to genuinely inspect or repair the lift and management knows you're there. Could you enlighten me?
I suppose it's like this... if someone was interested in classic cars, they went on holiday, then they found a classic car parked somewhere then out comes the camera. We were here for a week so plenty of time to have a look around for my special interest of old lifts. Also this place was built late 1960s so there seemed to be a good chance of finding something interesting, but it would appear all lifts were modernised mid-2000.
In Malaysia, theres one shopping mall that's the best mall for lift enthusaists... ALL LIFTS THERE ARE SCHINDLER M-SERIES AND THEY STILL WORK!! only 2 of them has broken down and never will be repaired...
Sadly 2 epic glass Schindler M-SERIES broke down like 7 years ago.... its still never got repaired and they made it derelict. rollers were also gone but original buttons are still there.. but some of the M-SERIES button were red instead of green... i still miss riding that old glass lift.. im 12 now and last time i rode it when i was like 5 years old theres 3 epic glass M series but sadly all of them are derelict... the shopping mall is big but you'll never be able to ride the epic glass lift again. only the non glass M-Series but i guess thats ok..
It was probably ripped off for some reason. In order for all ropes to snap and let go of the counterweight that elevator should have gone through extreme, catastrophic undermaintenance.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of these things are programmable. I also made a suggestion to bring your laptop along, disconnect the transmit pin and see if those serial cables spit anything interesting out. Wonder what you think of this? It might be a way to see what that soulless lift controller is thinking!
One thing that is never programmed which I wish it would be, especially at hotels for conventions I go to, or lunchtime in any office tower. Your modern lifts have sensors that know heavy it is, right? Even if it doesn’t, you can use the safety edge to count *roughly* how many people enter versus how many people exit, maybe. It’s far from a perfect way to do it, but it could be used as some sort of feedback for the weight sensor, like “ok, I weigh this much, and the safety edge has been broken this many times at landing and car calls, so I must have *roughly* this amount of people on board”. So if a lift is full, it is *stupid* for it to keep stopping at floors to pick people up when no more people can be picked up. Why not program the lifts so that when it gets full, it switches into an express mode, will not stop at landing calls, and will just proceed to the requested floors to dump the people out to where they’re going, and free the lift up more rapidly for the next batch of people? Why isn’t this a thing? It will get people moving around the building faster, and will reduce queuing for the lifts, since they won’t be stopping as often. They’ll fill up once, and start making their way up the building, and race back down empty, ready to do it all over again.
The multi call anti nuisance system has been around for decades, micro switch under the car platform detects no load and cancels the rest of the registered car calls. No need for fancy electronics or programming.
Cool, nice siren Aidan! There are lots of people that love sirens - I didn't know so many of them existed! I do have another siren hunt coming up sometime that I filmed, these are not Broadmoor but a different part of England. Thanks for the message.
That smiley face though. Lift engineer must have had a sense of humor but I think he as a bit cynical considering the words written on the cabinet. I love this kind graffitti, I’ve seen this on building sites too. When they where demolishing houses in a 1960’s neighbourhood in my town I found some genuine 1960’s graffiti on the inside of a cavity wall that must have been written on the wall when it was built. The exteriour brickwork was removed and the concrete frame had became visible. The text was not too friendly towards the building company.....
Those graffitis were probably made by a disrespectful urban explorer or lift enthusiast, not by engineers. Especially considering the ironic remarks about security that you pointed out.
Rule number one - respecting other people and their property, as this type of thing gives us all a bad name. The smiley face did lighten up the video though ;)