New contacts
and a board built from scratch

Planned maintenance,
not a failure.

The contact boards from two GE T875 voltage regulators came in for scheduled contact replacement. Nothing had failed in service. The regulators were due for scheduled maintenance, and the stationary contacts on both boards were worn from years of switching. One board came in worn but sound. The other was damaged past the point of safe reuse.

A damaged regulator board is not a shelf item. On an older regulator an OEM board can be slow to source or gone entirely, and the whole regulator is at risk if the board cannot be replaced. That is the point where a job stops being a contact change and becomes a fabrication problem.

Contacts machined
in our own shop.

We machined a new set of contacts in-house: copper bodies with copper-tungsten tips. Copper-tungsten resists the arc erosion that wears plain copper at the contact face, so the working surface holds up to the switching duty a regulator sees. We fitted the new contacts to the sound OEM board and returned it ready to install.

The damaged board,
re-made from GPO3.

For the board that could not go back in service, we fabricated a complete new one from GPO3, a glass-reinforced thermoset laminate used for high-voltage insulating hardware. We matched the original layout, fit the contact array, and populated it with the same copper and copper-tungsten contacts. The result is a drop-in board, not a patch, and it kept the regulator in the fleet instead of out of it.

Two boards in,
two boards ready.

Both GE T875 boards went back ready to install: one OEM board with new contacts, one board re-fabricated in GPO3 with the same contacts. This was a supply-only job. No field work was required. The utility avoided the wait on an OEM board and did not have to scrap a regulator over a damaged panel.