22 December 2008

Peachy In Keene

The new job is going well, though the extra hour and a half of daily driving leaves precious little time for blogging. Still, I have been thinking of y'all, especially last week when one of my coworkers left this on my bench:

punch1

"Think you can fix that for me?"

I'm a little embarrassed to say that it took me a while to catch on that he was pulling my leg. After all, I'm a welder. My purpose in life is to stick bits of metal together. Here are two perfectly good pieces of metal that used to be together, so why should it be out of the question for me to reunite them?

Well, they're hardened and all sorts of other specialized stuff to make them suitable for use in a massive hydraulic punch machine, and the process of welding the pieces back together would mess with the temper and make the thing brittle... but that's beside the point. Check out the fracture!

punch2
(as always, click to embiggen)

punch3

I have small hands, but that thing's still 0.75" in diameter at the fracture point. It's a hefty piece of metal... so imagine the force necessary to snap it like that.

Pretty cool, huh?

More about work soon, I promise.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sound like the commute time sucketh. But glad to hear the new job is working out.