PJ' goes high tech with propellers
By Ms. Angela Pidduck Published: 02/04/2009
FUNNY HOW an object which we have paid little or no attention to our whole life, suddenly gets a life of its own when spoken about by someone with a professional knowledge of the subject. This was the case when Caribbean Propellers Limited’s Peter Jay Williams recently chatted with me at La Soufriere Compound, in Chaguaramas, about propellers.
The former Coast Guard Lieutenant told me during his 17-year stint in the Engineering Department of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard he developed and implemented maintenance programmes for the upkeep of fast patrol boats and fast patrol launches. It was then that he realised the performance of boats “depended on the quality of propellers being used”.
“In the Coast Guard we always had a lot of problems and always under the props. I realised it had to be the propellers but this technology — a Computerised Propeller Inspection Programme — did not exist. This got my mind as to what I really wanted to do eventually.
“It’s like taking an X-ray of the propeller and seeing everything about it. To me this is a doctor’s shop. Like at a hospital, I can literally take an X-ray of the propeller and see everything that is right or wrong about the propeller, something you could never have done before.”
At the time Australia was the only place with the technology. So PJ, as he is fondly known, went off to Terry Ryan’s training classes in Australia, and found it had taken all of 14 years before a machine was made to achieve the standard set by the International Standard Organisation for the manufacture of propellers. “The people who do these things have to be artistically-minded to create this, but making it into a business has been a downfall. You could only buy the machine if you went to the training, and if you never fixed a propeller in your life, when you leave you know everything required to fix one.”
Williams is the only person in the Caribbean using this system. One other person uses the manual method. At present Williams is limited to propellers up to five feet in diameter but he aims to go to the bigger sizes, which means bigger equipment.
He is at La Soufriere Compound from 8 am to 4 pm, working overtime occasionally.
“With this X-ray you see what is wrong, there is no guessing. You know exactly what you have to do. This is where the computer helps in pinpointing the problem, so you can make sure the prop is fixed with a high degree of accuracy.”
Carib Props opened its doors in June 2001. Today, “There is no argument when you fix a propeller through this method,” Williams pointed out.
Just 52 years old, Williams is the fifth of 11 children born to Michael Jay and the late Tessie Williams. He is the identical twin brother to Richard Jay and when you first meet the twosome, it is extremely difficult to know which one of them you are addressing. He is married to Fern, a qualified Montessori teacher, and they are parents to Liana, who is pursuing a degree in Psychology and Music at the University of Toronto and Giles, a qualified land surveyor.
When Williams left St Mary’s College, he had already decided that, unlike the rest of his family, descendants of Louis Jay Williams, one of this country’s top business entrepreneurs, he would do something along technical lines. “From young I had been in cubs, scouts, had achieved the Duke of Edinburgh bronze, silver and gold awards, so that I was always inclined to go that way.”
He did a two year course at the John Donaldson Technical Institute, then entered the Hull College of Higher Education and pursued a Technical Diploma in Engineering Technology. Williams knew at the time that the Coast Guard was looking for somebody young whom they could train to stay in the technical field as a career.
“I wanted to be in the Coast Guard and I wanted to be on the technical side. There was no young officer technically inclined and that is what they needed. Two late Commanders, Mervyn Williams and Jack Williams had allowed me to help out down at Staubles Bay Headquarters while I was still at St Mary’s. One memorable session coincided with Harold La Borde’s Humming Bird 11 being berthed there and we were allowed to help to clean up the boat. I suppose it planted the seed.
“The practical experience continued while at John D, as during summer vacation Mervyn Williams again took me in to do engineering in the workshop, so when I officially applied to the Coast Guard, Mervyn Williams was in my corner.”
Williams’ cadetship was approved in April 1979 pending final results from Hull College. He was employed by the Coast Guard in June 1979 and his first commission was as an Engineer Officer. He went straight to the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England, where Prince Andrew was also a naval cadet. Later, he spent four months with the Brazilian Navy on an officer training ship travelling from Brazil to America and the Mediterranean.
Williams was the first career officer in the Engineering Department and helped to develop all the maintenance programmes needed for the operations of the modern Coast Guard. After leaving the Coast Guard, Williams joined the family firm of Spancrete Concrete Products and stayed for five years before fulfilling his lifelong wish to modernise the propeller industry locally.
