How CNC Onsite Cuts Repair Delays for US Operators

Allen Hall (0:00)

When a yaw ring tooth breaks or a rotor or lock hole wears oblong, the standard answer is a crane, and then months of waiting for one to show up.

This week, Søren Kellenberger is back, and his company, CNC Onsite, just opened its first US office in Houston. And he's here to talk about how machining up tower can replace months of crane time with a single week on site.

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Allen Hall (0:39)

Søren, welcome back to the program.

Søren Kellenberger (0:40)

Thank you very much, Allen. It's a pleasure.

Allen Hall (0:42)

Well, you have some really exciting news in the United States because CNC Onsite has been growing tremendously. You're now worldwide, and you've established a presence in the United States. That's correct.

Søren Kellenberger (0:56)

We have been working in the US actually for quite some time, but we see that the demand is definitely there. And we say with the market, the Northern American market has more than 100,000 turbines above 1 MW.

So of course, it's an interesting market. And we think that now is a good time for us to make that move and establish ourselves in the US. So we are really looking forward to that.

Allen Hall (1:29)

So you've seen a lot of growth in the company over the last couple of years as operators worldwide realize they have problems that they can't solve and it will only be solved by precision machining, which is what CNC Onsite does.

Where have you been doing work at lately? I know there's been, I've seen things on LinkedIn from Asia, but I know you guys are pretty busy right now.

Søren Kellenberger (1:52)

As you started saying it's, we are basically working globally. So we have had technicians in Australia, in Japan, in other Asian countries as well. Our main market is still Europe, where we also started and we are widely spread across Europe. And, but the US and including Canada is becoming a very interesting and important market for us. I think maybe the best way to explain it is that even though we are based in Denmark and working out of Denmark, 90% of what we do is outside of Denmark.

And once you travel, I mean, if you, whether you travel to Finland or if you travel to somewhere in the US., it doesn't make a huge difference. Our technicians are way from home and family anyway. So it's just the language is a bit different.

Allen Hall (2:48)

Well, what brings people to your business? What are they calling about today?

I know the yaw ring was the number one item. And that's what I remember is being when you were getting started, the yaw ring with the teeth being broken. Is that still your number one request or has that changed?

Søren Kellenberger (3:07)

It is definitely often a door opener because everyone can relate to that.

And so it brings a lot of interest to the company. And then when we start talking to customers about other wear issues in the turbine, it often turns out that we start to talk about worn sliding surfaces on the yaw ring, or it can be worn out rotor lock holes or wear and tear to generator shafts or main shafts. There's a whole lot of mechanical things that obviously gets worn when you have a turbine running for so many years and hours. And then we just try to see if we can come up with smart solutions where we can fix it up to our instead of deploying grains and doing large disassemblies.

Allen Hall (3:56)

Well, that's the real problem is I think a lot of operators realize that they have worn assemblies, but they don't really know of any solutions. Or they just live with it or they try to accommodate as best they can. With the yaw ring teeth, the way I had seen that until I talked to you was that they would get a guy with a welder up there and they try to weld these teeth back on. But that's really a temporary fix and it's not a long term solution. You're doing something that is actually better than what the OEM installed to begin with, right?

Søren Kellenberger (4:30)

Yeah, it's, you can say, instead of welding. And I won't say that welding doesn't have its place because for smaller repairs, welding can be a good fix as well. We do also work with welding companies for certain smaller repairs. But imagine you are up in a very confined space and when you have to start rebuilding a tooth by welding, the more of the tooth that is missing, the more you need also, one thing is the welding, but grinding it back to shape again is also a manual process. And it's obvious that the more of a tooth that is missing, the more difficult it is to get that actual shape of the tooth afterwards by grinding.