THE EARL OF TV

In 1968, give or take a year or two, I was working in Houston at AMF Tuboscope, a pipe inspection company, developing new technology for inspecting oil field pipe and pipelines.  We had a sister company in Canada, North American Inspection, that specialized in field inspection of transmission pipelines.  In particular, they were radiographers who examined the pipe welds between joints of pipe before the pipe was buried in the ground.  To add to their capability, we took on a project to develop an internal crawler robot that would carry a radioactive source along inside the pipe and deploy it at each girth weld where film had been wrapped around the outside of the weld.  Upon development of the film, the weld quality could be determined and cracks, porosity and other defects identified.  I was project engineer of this project and did the electronic design for the control system.

The crawler was a self-contained, autonomous device powered by an on-board 24 volt battery.  It was driven by a high-torque DC motor connected to a drive wheel.  The control system, consisting of discrete analog and digital IC’s was contained in an aluminum housing about 8-inches on a side.  Control knobs and switches on the top of the housing permitted set-up of the device.  The radioactive source was a cobalt isotope housed in a 200-lb. holder of spent uranium or lead.  When the robot sensed a weld, it stopped and a separate drive motor would drive the isotope from its holder into position to expose the film for a preset exposure time then it would be retracted back into a safe position and the crawler would move to the next weld.

The system was built and checked out in our Houston lab, then taken to a field site in Louisiana where it was used with North American radiographers for training before it was shipped to Canada.  All went well and the system was turned over to the North American company office in Calgary.  Not unexpectedly, we got a call within the next few weeks that there were problems with the control system.  I bagged up some spare parts, a few tools and a couple of test instruments and headed to Calgary.  As I went through customs, the Canadian authorities were interested in my little Sony battery powered oscilloscope and my function generator.  I explained the situation, but they said I could use Canadian instruments and confiscated my gear.  I pled my case to my North American contact, the office manager there, and he said he would see what he could do.  I told him I need some electronic workbench space to trouble shoot the system.

He came back later in the day and said, “I’ve found you a place to work.  It is the repair shop at a TV store.  The Earl of TV would close at 9 PM and I could use his shop all night long.”  OK, maybe this won’t be too bad.  I showed up at The Earl of TV and sure enough he had a work bench.   I had the electronics box from the robot and got ready to do my trouble shooting.  First problem:  The electronics required 24 VDC and the shop had only a 12 volt supply.  I dug around through everything in the shop, but no luck.  He did have some pliers, though, and fifteen minutes later, the 12 volt supply, in series with the battery from my rent car gave me the 24 volts I needed.  I thought surely there must be an audio oscillator or some such generator to produce an AC test signal.  Sorry, no oscillator, but I  did find, in his junk drawer, a filament transformer that let me produce at least a 60 Hz sine wave of a low voltage.  His oscilloscope, I will never forget it, was a Jackson CRO-2.  It did have a display, but no DC coupling.  If you connected the probe to a DC potential, the trace would sail off the screen and slowly drift back as the input capacitor charged up.  I won’t go into the agony of trouble-shooting digital switching circuits with an AC scope, but it was not fun.  To cut to the chase, I did survive the night and got the box working in time to turn it over to the North American crew the next day.  

One final touch:  On the day I was to return to Houston, I decided to pay a courtesy call to the Tuboscope Calgary office.  They were doing oil field inspections completely independent of the North American Inspection Company.  When I drove into the yard at the Tuboscope location, I saw a neat looking van painted in the company colors.  It had a Texas license plate.  I said, “Is someone here from the home office?”  Oh yeah, that’s the Quality Control van.  They are here to check our equipment.  The van had racks of power supplies, scopes, signal sources, etc.   If only I had known.  But then I’d never got to meet the Earl of TV.  Over 20 years later, on another trip to Calgary, I checked a phone book and sure enough The Earl was still listed.  I really doubt that he ever repaired a TV, though.