The Queen of the Skies

GFS Lighting Repair

George Suarez - The hands down King of CUSTOMER SERVICE....................!

It is not often that I get a chance to praise someone, but for this particular incident, I must devote a whole web page to this guy.

Date: Sunday October 5, 2008

I arrived late yesterday (Saturday) at Triple Tree Aerodrome, with "The Light" loaded on my truck. As it was late in the after noon, and the week before the event, we left "The Light" loaded on my truck and parked at the "New Gazebo" at the South end of Triple Tree Aerodrome. We decided that we would set it on Sunday or Monday. Being a beautiful warm afternoon, it was time to kick back and enjoy a few adult beverages. Later on in the evening, a friend of mine that had helped me with many projects said that he would miss the "Firing" of the light, as he had to leave Monday morning to go out of town on business. (First Mistake) Not wanting him to miss seeing the light, I decided to temporarily "Fire" the light while it was still loaded on the truck. It would not project the beam of light it was supposed to, but they would get the idea....! I pulled my truck up next to the Gazebo's electrical panel and strung out the power cord and unloaded the 'Ballast" that drives the light. (Second Mistake) Letting someone help me that had had more to drink than I did.........To make a very long story short, the light fired and was spectacular for about five minutes, before it took itself offline. Upon further investigation, it was found that "someone" had wired the breaker wrong that fed the ballast, putting some voltage where it should have not been..................(Third Mistake) NOT checking what someone else had done........! Consequently, something was FRIED in the Igniter Circuit of "The Light" or the VERY expensive bulb had burned out. With the way my luck runs, the bulb would be the culprit, and finding one in a week would be astronomical, at best.  This would have to be dealt with on Monday, as there was nothing that anyone could do on Saturday night or all day Sunday.

Just a little back ground on George Suarez  - I had been dealing with George for a long time on the setup and installation of the HMI (Hygerium Metallic Iodide) equipment needed to make "The Light" burn again. George is an expert in Theatrical lighting, and pretty much knows all there is to know about these monster lights. George had priced me up a system for "The Light" to replace the original Carbon Arc light source, and he had priced it very reasonably. While I was considering his equipment, the very exact light that I needed came up on eBay, at a very reduced price, from what George had quoted for the individual components. George told me that i would be foolish not to bid on the eBay item, as he could not touch the price, so I did and I won the auction, at a great price. remember, George has invested a lot of time in me already and he has NOTHING in return. He was great on the phone, and helped me with many items on the installation of the HMI (Hygerium Metallic Iodide) into "The Light", never mentioning any cost for anything.

Through George, several weeks before the event, I had been thinking about a "spare" bulb for "The Light" as I had NO idea how many hours were on the one that I had. (They are good for about 250 hours of burning time). George gave me a contact in California (Wolfram, Inc.) that I could contact and get a decent price for a new bulb. I never called, as I wanted to get through the event and deal with the rest of the logistics on "The Light" during the Winter. Well Monday arrived, it was time to set "The Light" and we proceeded. Panic had not set in yet and I figured that WE had plenty of time to work on "The Light" during the week. My first call was to Nikki, at Wolfram, Inc., she was not there, so I left a message. She called me back and said that if I needed a bulb, they could "Next Day Air" it to me, that was a total relief, so some pressure left my thinking. As always, there are other projects that go on at Triple Tree, that need attention before the events. The light was set, I had a bulb source, so No Sweat....! We proceeded to add some lighting to the New Bath House, install some additional receptacles, and install some additional circuits for the vendors that would be set up at the South end of the field for the Fly In.

OK, its Wednesday and time to trouble shoot the light. All I had to determine was if I had a bad bulb or there was something else wrong with the circuitry, remember...think simple...Bad Bulb....! I had set the ballast up, corrected the wiring, and fired it for a test...nothing.! I checked the output from the ballast everything was OK voltage wise, but the Igniter would not fire. It should fire even if I had a bad bulb..............something was keeping it from working, a safety maybe? The original light had a safety built in so the igniter would not fire if the door to the light was open, of course I had to bypass this with a jumper, that is where if thought the problem would be.........jumper is fine and working, this led to the firing relay, could it be bad? I did everything that I knew of and did not find anything wrong with the relay. Remember, there are no wiring diagrams for this light, and it was made in France to boot......! OK...here it is late Wednesday, nothing is working and panic is starting to set in.........go figure. Well, I decide to call George in Hollywood, but he is not there, so I leave my number with someone else to have him call me when he gets back.

OK...Thursday lunchtime, have not herd from George, panic is REALLY starting to set in, so I call again....he answers, says he is busy as hell and would call me back shortly...Brain says....(I should have bought the stuff from him....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) George calls me back around 3 PM Thursday, and I go through ALL of the scenarios that I have covered, what happened and what I thought it may be, bad relay or something holding it from striking. We talked about the bulb, and he was pretty sure that it wasn't that. He wanted to see if he could find a wiring diagram and got me to explain every piece of equipment that I had, as these lights, while they were made by LTM, had different sources for parts. He asked if we could send pictures of the igniter assembly and Joey Griffin had an iPod that had a camera, so we snapped three pictures and tried to email them to George. Of course they NEVER went through and by this time it was getting very late on Thursday. George said he would call me when he got in on Friday morning 12 PM my time. He assured me that we would get it working, he just wanted to find some diagrams of the circuitry.

OK, Friday morning, event has been held up by rain and wind, starting to clear and planes are coming in....EVERYONE is curious about "The Light".....! (Beyond Panic...have settled on complete FAILURE of a years worth of work)

George calls me at 2 PM my time, said he has had a busy morning...hell I understand, I was figuring he would not call again, as I was sure I was becoming a MAJOR pain in his ass....! We start trouble shooting, he ask me questions, nothing matches....he tells me that my igniter is from France, and he really doesn't have any paper work on it, but he says that they ALL work the same......we spend the better part of an hour on the phone, as by this time, I had ripped the igniter board out of the light and had it setting on a table. He ask me if there was a "thingy" that had silver wires coming out of each end of it.......by the way he was describing it, it should have been much larger and I was NOT looking for a resistor, but some type of shunt device......we finally narrowed it down to a "Safety" resistor that feeds the coil on the igniter relay....it was Fried....! He told me to cut it out, reinstall the igniter and test fire it. Also, he said to have everyone stand back, as by this time I had acquired quite an audience to see if the thing was going to work. Well, we hooked everything up, cleared the area, applied power and the NOISE I was looking for was finally there, the bulb arced and we had LIGHT....! The sound is hard to describe; it sounds like rubbing a quarter on a washing board for 1.5 seconds, this is the high voltage noise of 60 thousand volts making the bridge to ignite the electrodes in the bulb.

George has become my HERO, as he truly saved the day for the light and for the event, and saved my ass TOTAL embarrassment, in front of my friends.....!!!!!!!!!  Something that I seem to be getting very good at in my later years.............

He truly went FAR beyond what would/could have been expected in customer service, as I was really not a customer, but I think a friendship has evolved out of this. George, I could never say Thank You enough, to cover the feeling I had when I herd "That Noise" we were looking for Friday afternoon.

You can see the bad resistor below, it is a 22 ohm 3 watt beauty that has since been replaced and we even have a spare....you can only buy them in pairs. Funny how a 50 cent part can completely disable a several thousand dollar operation......GO figure..!

As to the iPod pictures that George needed, after all was said and done Friday, a light bulb went off in my head as we were saying good bye on the phone. The pictures of everything I had were on this web site and easily available to George, but neither of us thought about that, at the time they were needed.