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Show Page HILL TOP TIMES 10 Ma :6.197S The million dollar baby On Sir Bv Bob Roberts One Million Cubic Feet of Clean Air. . wide and capable of producing 70,000 cubic feet of air per minute. All of the air brought in from outside by these fans is filtered through an oil bath and then heated as required to keep the temperature right around seventy degrees. There are twenty of these fans, with exhaust fans to match, and a filter bank almost as long as the building. . Every Minute!!! The Hill Air Force Base Maintenance Directorate Bldg. 220 was designed to clean, strip and paint aircraft. It is one of the most environmentally safe areas on base in which to work. Did we mention heat? This one building uses 7 percent of the total capacity of the steam produced on Hill Air Force Base. Annual consumption is approximately 155,520 MILLION BTU's. dubbed "The Million Dollar of its ability to completely because Baby" one cubic feet of air in the million the change once building every minute, it still functions at peak efficiency, even after twenty years of continuous operation. Originally The water used is recirculated, and there are fourteen pumps, one for each of the twenty foot paint booths, each capable of pumping 1,000 gallons of water every minute. You have to see the size of the air intake fans to believe that anything can be that big; souirrel cage fans, eight feet tall by four feet 5slS45iS r- -t eeiry trapping the paint particles in the waterfall . . . washing the air and recirculating over six million gallons of water per eight hour shift. . . And just to be sure. . . the word for the day is "Respirator"! Two types are used by personnel while they are stripping or painting the aircraft; the standard organic filtering type and the Air Line type which provides clean air that is first filtered through the special "Del Monix" filters that produce the kind of air we had before the word pollution became popular. The people working in the cleaning area will never win a "best dressed person of the year" award, but in their rubber boots, aprons, gloves and full face shields, they can work in safety and never worry about the inra a chemical materials they are using. The "Million Dollar Baby" does not look much from the outside, but approximately 16,000 souare feet of the total 63,000 square feet of space is utilized for safety equipment, i.e., blowers, filters, fans, pumps and reservoirs. . . all working to clean, filter and scrub the air. That's the way it goes! It costs almost half a million dollars a year for heat, plus a large expenditure for electricity to run the 25 HP electric fan motors, the pumps or the mercury vapor lights that make it just like daylight on the darkest nights. This is a lot of money to spend to provide a safe working facility for the 80 persons assigned, but those 80 people produce the best looking aircraft paint jobs in the Air Force. like lIllillsilllBIl 1 i As A - - ""'X. KIJjt t i i t V i 4" . wit W it Sx:towS. t 7" ''"V -' WrW I Ft Tjfff Ni- ; i V- WW 1 rraojo James D. Sorensen spray paints an to the delivery using command. PAINTS (left to right) Juan Trujillo. Delfin Romero, Leland Lee, Edgar Oldridge, Ephrim Twitchell scrub down an F-- 4 aircraft before deliv ery to the production line for repairs. F-- 4 before SCRUB DOWN i;3 n i POLLUTION ELIMINATOR A full wall of filters designed to eliminate pollution of exhausted air from the building ' U 1 ' ' h K I i 7 t ...J' , ! -- - i,?f'! 11'' ' 1 j :' , " ; iafat.:-.iMtnMn- r li fill , 1 ; v,i,mm ij , ?j I t Pnotos : OLmJULOJLSLiUUULAJLgS iiucwHk 5 ''4. 1 '1: V lining tfw:& The 8 foot air intake fan dwarfs foreman Brent Frost as he checks the drive section for vibration. AIR INTAKE Air Force, EXHAUST HOOD specially-designe- d Lynn Bailey, Ray Huddleston and Calvin Weber strip parts in front of a exhaust hood. |