Feed the Bead

Trickle-Down Theory?

2009-02-07T17:42:00.002-05:00

The company I work for, though it has a fabrication component, is primarily a roofing company. So it was to my great surprise that I came in to work a few weeks ago and found a puddle next to my table, being fed by a regular drip from the ceiling. The first thing I did was to ask our janitor/handyman/fetcher-of-stuff for a bucket so I'd at least remember not to walk under the leak. The second thing I did was tell one of the bosses that the roof was leaking.

Five minutes later, she was back with a status report. "Well, in spite of us being a roofing company, there are no actual roofers around right now. As soon as a crew gets back, I'll send them over."

The next day, I introduced the roofers to the leak, and they climbed up to the roof to see if they could find it. After half an hour of stomping and poking noises from up there, they re-appeared to inform me that they couldn't find anything, but they said they'd rig something up so I didn't keep getting rained on. I was out the next day because of a snowstorm, but when I came back the following day, I found this hanging over my table:

Yes, that's a tarp secured to the rafters with twine, and screwed into the center of it is a garden hose that goes down to a bucket. Really high-tech, isn't it? That thing stayed up for a good two or three weeks before they had to move the crane hoist from one end of the shop to the other, and since the tarp-hose dealie was in the way, I'm back to just a bucket.

The roof has since sprung another leak, ten feet away in my neighbor's booth. He doesn't even bother with a bucket, but he also doesn't seem to mind getting wet.

I'm sure the roofs we install don't leak like our own does... at least, I hope they don't.

Trogdor?

2009-01-17T20:59:00.003-05:00

Occasionally I do something stupid at work. This week I did two stupid things: I welded a part together with an incorrect component that couldn't be cut off, so the whole thing had to be replaced, and I set my chair on fire.

Naturally, I'd rather talk about the chair.

I was MIG welding a part, finished, picked up the part, and walked across the building to the inspection room to verify that I'd put the thing together properly. A few minutes later, one of my fellow welders came into the inspection room and said, "you need a new chair." I raised an eyebrow, thinking maybe he'd done something to the chair, until he continued, "you set it on fire."

Oh.

Whoops.

Apparently a spark from the welding had landed on the chair, smoldered for a minute, and then jumped to flame. My coworker saw the plume of smoke rising from my booth, ran over, grabbed the chair, dragged it outside, and dumped it in a snowbank to put it out.

The best part of all this? The guy whose booth I took over really liked that chair, and told me to "keep it warm" for him in case he was re-hired.

I don't think this was what he had in mind.

"Honey, Your Gloves Are On Fire."

2009-01-07T20:03:00.001-05:00

When I woke up to sleet on top of snow on top of ice this morning, with more sleet and freezing rain predicted for the rest of the day, I determined that making the hour-long drive to work wasn't safe, so I called out. I do love my daily dose of metalwork, though, so my boyfriend and I got some work done in his shop, a safe 30-second walk from our back door.

He's been complaining for a while that his cast anvil needed to be dressed; its horn in particular was in need of grinding. Once I convinced him that I love grinding stuff like that, he handed me the 4" angle grinder and an 80-grit flap wheel and went off to take care of some chores. This was what the horn looked like when he left the shop:

And this is what it looked like when he came back ten minutes later:

Pretty spiffy, eh? He was suitably impressed with my skill with the grinder, and put me to work on his dishing forms, which were also in need of some work. I didn't take pictures of them because the difference between before and after was more tactile than visual... they still look a little pitted, but they're smoother than they were.

We also made a new tool today. One of the products Erik makes is a ring belt, and he's a little sick of buying commercially-made rings for them, so he asked me to help make a tool that would enable him to make his own rings. I brought home some 2" round bar and 1" square bar, he forged a tapered end on the square bar so it'll fit in his stake plate, and I welded the two pieces together. I helped a little with the forging process, holding the bar with tongs while he whacked it with a hammer, and my insulated leather gloves started smoking a few times from the heat of the tongs. I didn't even feel it.

This is our shiny new ring-maker:

This has been one of my most productive days off in a while. I'm happy.

Peachy In Keene

2008-12-22T20:22:00.000-05:00

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:

"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!

(as always, click to embiggen)

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.

Breaking News!

2008-11-18T18:58:00.001-05:00

This afternoon I was offered a full-time position at Melanson Co., Inc. in Keene, New Hampshire. I start December 8th. I'm very excited.

Now to tell my current bosses that they only have me for two more weeks. Ugh.

Wild Week

2008-10-21T20:46:00.001-04:00

There's been plenty of blog-worthy activity at work in the last week. Trouble is, that same activity has been exhausting me so much that I haven't had the energy to write about it. Even now I'm not sure I'll get this entry finished before I fall asleep, but I'm going to try. I'm sure y'all are desperate to know the fate of my fantastic shelving units.

In a move that reminded me of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, Bob announced last week that there would be not three shelves, but five. This wouldn't have been a problem if we'd had enough material for five shelves. But no, we have enough for three and a half, plus enough bits to stick together to complete a fourth.

Yes, bits. Six- and eight-inch bits of 2x2 tubing and angle iron that I butted end to end to make longer pieces. Now, I'm all for using up the material we have instead of ordering more, but it's really annoying to do those joints and try to keep the whole thing plumb on a table that... isn't.

But at least I have a big enough table to work on now. For about a week and a half I was borrowing a smallish table from the guy in the next booth, but he needed it by the end of last week, so I was using the thin, wobbly table that's a permanent fixture in my booth. Steve, one of the "back room" guys (the "back room" is about a third of the shop, and I still can't understand why they call it that), decided that I deserved a good table, so he and one of the other forklift drivers got together and moved a part that didn't need to be on its tables anymore.

The part? A 10-foot ring. The guys picked it up with two forklifts, took it around a 90° bend, and put it on blocks outside. The coordination required for that move was astounding, and I really wish I could've taken video of it. Unfortunately, photography and videography are forbidden in the shop. Oh well.

I do occasionally bring little things home (things that, if removed from the shop, will not get me fired or violate the non-disclosure agreement I signed), and I'll take pictures of them for you when I have time and light. For now, I'm off to bed so I can be awake enough to finish making my three (five, sir!) five shelves tomorrow.

Shelved

2008-10-15T05:39:00.000-04:00

Have you ever had one of those projects at work that keeps getting redesigned and altered as you're trying to complete it? I came to expect that at Finebar because it was a natural part of working on prototypes like the conical refiners. Here at AMK, I'm building... shelves. For the shop. And while I respect my bosses, I kind of feel like giving them each a good whack on the head for continually redesigning such a simple project.

They've altered the height, they've added pieces, they've changed the material, they've mistakenly cut parts out of the wrong metal (wasting almost $500 worth of Inconel that somebody said was scrap), and I've been a good little employee and rolled with all of these alterations. But I still want to smack people. They're shelves, for crying out loud! Three simple tool shelves that, had the design not been messed with every day, would have taken me four days, total, to fabricate and paint. It's been a week and a half now, and they're still not even close to being finished.

I'd like to finally get these things done so I can, y'know, practice for certification on something other than carbon steel tubing. Once I'm certified, I can work on "real" projects... the stuff that makes the company money. I feel bad that these shelves are costing the company so much in labor. Speaking of which, my first payday is at the end of this week! It will be so nice to have money again.

Chicks and Dicks

2008-10-09T17:48:00.001-04:00

I think it's about time for you to meet some of my coworkers. I'll do this in installments so it's not too overwhelming. I'll call this first section Chicks and Dicks.

There's one other female welder in the shop. She's about my age, very friendly, and her name is Rhonda. Her name is going to take a while to stop making me twitch, because it's the punchline of a very bad, very sexual visual joke I learned a few years ago. Anywho, she's a nice girl, and I know next to nothing about her because we haven't really talked aside from the daily, "good morning."

The three other women I see on a regular basis are Linda, Jennifer, and Kim. Linda is the Human Resources lady, so she's in charge of pestering people to get their insurance/401(k)/payroll paperwork filled out in a timely fashion. Jennifer is another office employee, and she has some sort of connection to timekeeping. Kim... well, I'm not entirely sure what she does, but she sure does it in a chipper and perky way. She's the lone Pomeranian in this shop full of hound dogs, and we all kind of look at her and wonder where she gets the energy to be so happy all the time.

Now for the Dicks, or rather, the Richards. There are three of them. One works in another part of the shop, so I don't interact with him. The other two have been working closely with me this week, one as sort of a supervisor (I call him Rick), and one as an assistant (I call him Little Ricky). They're both really nice guys, eager to help and teach. Rick is an old-timer, Little Ricky just turned 21, and yet they get along really well, both with each other and everyone else.

More to come!

First And Second

2008-10-07T19:53:00.002-04:00

First day? Kinda boring. Paperwork, safety instruction, and then hours and hours of test plates that refused to behave the way I wanted them to.

Second day? Awesome. I ran a few test plates which consistently came out nicely, and then spent the rest of the day building shelves out of square tubing. My back is killing me, but I'm very satisfied with my work.

Oh, and I got a barcode today! The time clock uses a barcode scanner, and my shiny, laminated, code tag was handed to me shortly after I arrived this morning. I feel official now.

So far, the biggest difference between AMK and Finebar is that the guys here actually work, and enjoy what they do. Nobody has complained about anything aside from the fact that work is really slow right now because of the economic situation. When the guys are complaining that they have to sit around and do nothing and getting paid for it, you know you work in a good shop.

Almost There

2008-09-30T10:32:00.002-04:00

My "first day" was actually five minutes of paperwork and the command to pee in a cup and then wait a week for the results of both the drug test and the background check before they'll give me a start date. Exciting, eh?

Another week of waiting is frustrating, but they'll be paying me more than they said they would, so I can deal with the delay. Maybe I can finally get my room clean in the meantime.

Renaissance

2008-09-28T00:14:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the delay there, folks. I'm finally back in the saddle, or at least tacking up. I start my new job on Monday! I'll be a TIG welder at a company that primarily makes and repairs aircraft parts. So, lots of stainless, aluminum, and titanium (that one will be new for me), and they're hiring me as a trainee, which means I'll be under a little less pressure to amaze them right off the bat.

I had my interview and test on Monday. The interview went well, with the bosses' two main concerns being my short time in the field and the fact that I'm female. Their last female welder, it seems, encouraged the attention of all the guys, and was asked to leave because nobody was getting any work done. I think I made it pretty clear that I had no problem fending off advances and telling the guys to get back to work, and the manager seemed satisfied.

The test was just to see where my skill level was, and while I'd spent some time at school last week practicing, I still wasn't where I wanted to be. I had to do butt joints on thin (18g) and thick (10g) stainless, and a T-joint of thin to thick. My thin butt was too hot, my thick butt was too cold, and my T, while a little too hot, was actually pretty nice.

So yeah, regular blogging will recommence, and hopefully y'all won't be bored to tears.

The Sound of Silence

2008-02-05T19:52:00.000-05:00

I'm taking some time off to get my surroundings sorted out and my head in the right place, but I will be looking for work soon. In the meantime, here are some pics of the TIG work I was doing in school last year.

The first two are stainless, the last is mild steel. I miss school.

Instruction

2008-01-03T03:11:00.000-05:00

Graduation is tomorrow, and even though I'm not going to the ceremony, I've been looking back over the last 15 months, thinking about the things I loved and hated about going to Baran. At the top of both the Love and Hate lists: teachers.

I had nine teachers, total. Of those, I love and respect two, I hate one, and like (to varying degrees) the other six. Let's start with the worst.

He's a pompous windbag. He thinks he's funny. He spends as little time welding as possible. He gives the same advice for every welding question: turn up the heat and go faster. He doesn't take refusal seriously, which is why he's the only teacher I ever seriously threatened to hit. (Yes, my braid nearly reaches my waist. Yes, you dated a girl who didn't mind you pulling on her braid. I, however, do mind. No, really. Stop it. I'm not kidding. Seriously. Piss off!) His teaching skills in the classroom are as bad as in the shop. He presents information exactly as we see it in the book, and can't take any other approach. He may be a good welder with lots of experience, but he's not a good teacher.

The teachers I like all have their good and bad qualities. There's the one with more certifications than you can shake an electrode at, who's a wizard at pipe welding, but if you make eye contact with him, he'll launch into a series of stories about near-death experiences he's had on the job over the last forty years. There's the one who gave me a ton of help when I was doing stick welding, but sneered about TIG welding, saying he could do just as well with a soldering gun. There's the ex-Marine who seems to enjoy his job, but has a very traditional approach to math class: if you can't learn it, just memorize it for the test. There's the guy who treats everything like a joke, and is rarely seen without an impish grin on his face, but surprised me when he gave me a demonstration that really helped my pipe welding technique.

The two teachers I love are the reason I'll be going back to visit from time to time. Don and Chris geniunely care about the students' understanding of theory and constantly push us to do better work in the shop. They give praise when it's due, temper their criticism with advice, and appreciate the fact that we've paid a lot of money to learn a trade from them. I rarely see either of them standing around doing nothing. They're always walking around, checking on our progress. They're friendly, helpful, intelligent, caring men, and I will miss both of them.

Monday and Tuesday will be my last days at Baran. Now I need to find a new job and save up enough money to start paying back my student loans. Welcome to the real world... have some debt.

Distraction

2007-12-16T14:58:00.000-05:00

At school (which I'll be done with in a few weeks, thank gods), we do a lot of bend tests. We weld two pieces of metal together, edge-to-edge, cut the newly-created piece into strips ("coupons") perpendicular to the weld, and bend them with a pneumatic hammer. This tests the strength of the weld. The guys at school are always amazed at how nice my coupons look, so I decided to write a little tutorial. The pictures here are of my 6G-downhand stick pipe test, and every single piece broke because I didn't bother cleaning out the slag.

How to Make Your Bend Tests Pretty

This is what a coupon looks like right after I (don't give a sh*t about doing a good job and) cut it. Not pretty.

The face was ground before cutting (easier for me to mark out the coupon that way), so now the root side needs to be ground. Always grind along the length of the weld so the grind marks end up perpendicular to the weld. Don't go crazy... once the root buildup is flush, you're just getting the mill scale off, and that doesn't require much pressure.

Now come the edges. First, grind along the length. Use the soapstone cutting lines on the face as a grinding guide.

This may look flat, but it isn't. How do you make it flat? Come around to the side (looking at the face of the coupon as it's clamped), hold the grinder so the wheel is parallel to the floor, and grind back and forth along the length of the coupon. Because the new grind marks are perpendicular to the first lot, it's easy to see where your high and low points are. The little batches of stripes here are the low points:

If the highs are especially high or the lows especially low, go back to grinding along the length of the weld, just in the high spots. Come around to the side for a few sideways-grinding passes now and then until it's pretty close to being flat. Use the sideways-grinding to finish, and the piece should look like this:

Put a small bevel on the corners, file off the burrs, and go break it!

Fin

2007-12-14T14:22:00.000-05:00

Ten minutes before lunch today, the Canadians rounded us all up, brought us into the break room, and, with very little fanfare, terminated our employment. The company is closed. We got 11 days of severance pay, plus any unused vacation and sick days, and all the paperwork we need to file for unemployment benefits.

Time to find a new job. Grr.

Disability

2007-12-06T06:01:00.000-05:00

An hour or two after I finished the skirts for the big adapter plates, Joe came over and told me how I could have made it easier... I could have used my pneumatic sander to put a little bevel on the inside corner of the skirt so it would sit over the bead of paste. "If you can't raise the bridge," says he, "lower the river."

I really loathe that phrase now.

I try not to talk much about my medical issues at work because I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses or trying to be special or something. On the other hand, Joe seems to be expecting me to figure stuff out on my own, and that's not something I'm really capable of. The combination of medication, sleep, diet, and sunlight keeps my brain functional, but only just. I can follow orders, assemble parts, do good welding, and stay focused on what I'm doing. Thinking outside the box, on the other hand, is nigh impossible for me.

When people meet me, they assume I'm smart. I'm really not. I'm skilled and I know lots of stuff, but applying that knowledge isn't something I do well. I tend to get stuck on trying to make something work one way, only to find out later that I could have saved myself a whole lot of trouble by approaching the problem from a different angle, like with the skirts. I hate disappointing people, especially my bosses, but at the same time I don't want them to get frustrated every time I fail to solve a problem.

My 90-day review is supposed to be next week. Things I want to discuss include a change in my schedule next month and a pay raise. Wish me luck!

Trouble In Engineering

2007-11-30T22:05:00.000-05:00

Joe checked my work yesterday, verified that he'd forgotten a hole, congratulated me on my jury-rigged solution to the problem, and pointed out a few extra things that I needed to do. He does that a lot... explains the basics, sends me on my way, and then comes back later with more information that would have come in handy before I started the order. He's an engineer. It's what he does.

As an engineer, he also has a habit of only seeing what's on the computer screen, and not what really happens in the shop. The big adapter plates I did last week were pasted, cooked, and then machined true (guaranteed flat) on top. Today I started attaching the skirts to the edges. And I developed the intense urge to smack Joe in the head.

When a piece is pasted and then cooked in the vacuum furnace, the copper paste spreads over the steel and bonds with it, forming a much stronger material. It also has a tendency to settle in corners. This isn't a big deal most of the time, but the skirts are supposed to sit flush on a ledge against the edge of the piece, and with that little bead of paste there... they don't.

Attaching skirts is difficult enough to begin with, but when they don't sit flush, the job gets considerably more difficult. If the skirt and the edge aren't touching, the edge material won't fuse with the skirt material when it melts, and the skirt will fall off. There's no way to fix it after the fact except to put a really ugly tack at the bottom of the skirt.

This batch of plates has a lot of those ugly little tacks. Ugh.

I'm going to keep repeating, "I will not hit Joe, and the plates will be fine," over and over again until I brainwash myself into believing it.

Adaptation

2007-11-28T06:03:00.000-05:00

I spent all day yesterday working on smaller MiniSegment™ adapter plates. I really hope I did them correctly... I was a little confused about part of the job, but Joe wasn't there, so I couldn't get an informed answer. I consulted with Melvin, Paul, and Jason (nicknamed "Paul Jr."), and eventually came up with something that worked, but I'm still a little confused.

Adapter plates (along with a bunch of other things we make) are layers of .187" stainless steel sandwiched together. The plates I made yesterday had four layers. Usually when there's something with layers, there are at least two holes for spring pins in all of the layers. The pins align the layers and keep them from moving while the part is being welded.

Three of the four layers in yesterday's plates had a pinhole. One pinhole. That was kind of a problem, but even worse was that the top layer didn't have a pinhole at all. All of the layers had bolt holes, but the holes were too big for the bolts that should have fit in them. So I scrounged. I discovered some hole-plugs (which Jason later told me had been made for previous MiniSegment™ versions) that fit snugly enough to keep everything aligned while I made a few crucial tacks.

I just hope I didn't screw anything up. Joe is the only person who completely understands a lot of the jobs that come out to the shop, so he's the only one whose answers I trust. Hopefully he'll be around this morning to make sure I haven't made a mistake.

He's Mocking You

2007-11-21T06:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, one of our nearly-finished pieces did something our nearly-finished pieces aren't supposed to do: it cracked. I don't mean the little cracks that Mike used to have me fix... I mean a four-inch section of a weld split open. Joe brought it to me for repairs, and I did the best I could. I sanded out as much of the broken weld as I could, and spent about ten minutes re-welding and re-sanding and re-re-welding, trying to patch the crack without using filler wire. The finished product was nowhere near as good as I wanted it to be, but Joe said it would be fine, and I trust him.

One of the reasons why I like Joe is that, even when he's in a bad mood and everything is going wrong, he's always good for a laugh. One of the key elements of this repair job was using our hydraulic drill press to clamp the piece really, really tightly. Pull down on the lever, pressure is applied, repeat until something snaps (the part, the operator's shoulder, whatever). Joe commented that the repaired piece felt more flush than it had earlier, and I replied, "it better... I used every single one of my 130 pounds on that lever." His response, "I used to be a skinny little thing... but then you get married, you have kids, you lose the will to live... things change."

His son is going to be just like him. He told me that he was reading the kid a story the other night, and out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the kid was playing with a stuffed animal, making its head move as if it were talking. After a while he stopped and asked the kid what was up with the animal, and the kid said, "he's mocking you, Daddy."

My boss is being mocked by his 7-year-old's toys. Should I be worried?

Skirt The Issue

2007-11-20T05:39:00.001-05:00

I've been really depressed for the last few days. Every time I start writing a post, I get a paragraph in and realize that I'm just complaining about being depressed. So here's an attempt at actual content.

I finished the last of the adapter plates yesterday, thank the gods. Two-and-a-half more inlet rings, and then these MiniSegment™ jobs will go off to be cooked and ground. After that I'll have to attach the skirts, which is one of my least favorite tasks.

Remember back when we had dot-matrix printers, and the paper had those strips on the sides with the holes for the feed wheels? I used to love creasing the perforations and gently ripping those strips off. Skirts for adapter plates and backs look a lot like those strips (only, y'know, 1/16"-thick stainless steel, and with 1/8" holes every 2 or 3 inches). The skirt gets clamped to the part, and the material of the part gets melted with the material of the skirt at every hole. As I've said before, this is not my favorite task. In fact, I'm quite bad at it. I just have to hope I don't screw up any of these pieces. These are two $15K orders for the same client... together worth more than my annual net income.

But I still love my job. ;-)

Last week, Christophe told me that three of our smallest conicals would begin production this week. I really hope I get parts today, because it looks like the next job available after I finish the inlet rings might be another one of those jobs of which I'm not particularly fond: backs. I think being the Special Projects welder has spoiled me... I have no love for anything but my conicals now.

We'll see what the laser spits out for me today.

Temporal Drift

2007-11-16T05:26:00.000-05:00

There are two identical MiniSegment™ jobs that I've been working on. The orders were placed on October 6th. I got the parts at the end of the day on November 12th. The promised ship date is... today, November 16th.

I just about fell over laughing when I saw that. This is a time-consuming order... there are a ton of little welds, and everything has to be clamped before it's welded, which means repositioning the clamp every few welds... it's easy, but it takes forever. I keep wanting to bitch at the suits for making such optimistic promises about ship dates, but I doubt that would go over well.

I might finish my part of the job tonight, but it'll take another two days or so for the rest of it (grinding, brazing, drilling, etc.) to be finished. It might ship by Thanksgiving.

23rd, 16th... it's all the same, right?

MiniFinns?

2007-11-13T17:09:00.000-05:00

My rotor finally came back from machining yesterday (looking shiny and beautiful), and today it's packed up with its stator, ready to be shipped to Finland. Because of that destination, my guess is that it's a sample for our parent company's Helsinki office to measure and test to make sure it's not going to catastrophically fail the way one of the earlier models did. I hope it passes the test.

I'm working on MiniSegment™ adapter plates this week. The third-circle that's pulled away from the rest of the piece in that picture is what I'm assembling: four layers of 0.187"-thick steel, clamped, pinned, and tack-welded together. The welding is done in stepped cutouts on the back of the plate. It's tedious and tough on the arms because the big C-clamp needed to hold everything together has to be moved every two or three welds to be sure the area being welded is completely flush. It takes me about two-and-a-half hours to weld a complete circle.

I'm exhausted, so I'm skipping school and going to bed. Night, folks.

Les Cochons

2007-11-08T16:36:00.000-05:00

"Must be niiiiiice," comes the sarcastic whine from any of my four most annoying coworkers. I tense up, then force myself to take a deep breath and relax, because getting angry at these narrow-minded, self-important idiots won't help anything. I just try to tune them out and focus on my work.

That whine marks the end of just about any statement they make about how easy the supervisors/bosses have it, sitting in soft chairs in quiet offices or cubicles. According to the guys, everyone in the office sits around doing nothing all day. Parts are designed, programmed, and sold by magic. Supplies just appear on their own. Our paychecks... well, we had some trouble with them today, so I'll just skip that bit.

The guys don't think about these things. They think they're the only ones who work, that they deserve far more respect than they get, and that anyone who isn't one of them is a jerk. They have no idea what goes on in the offices, and they don't bother thinking about it because they've already decided that anyone whose hands are still clean at the end of the day can't have done any real work.

I really want to smack these guys sometimes.

Okay, most of the time.

Maybe always.

Yeah.

Bits and Pieces

2007-11-06T16:53:00.000-05:00

I called in dead on Monday and enjoyed having the house to myself in spite of feeling like crap. Today I came in and found my spacers waiting for me, so I spent a little over six hours spacing the stator barsets. About two hours into that task, Joe brought me the parts for the stator fixtures. I spent the last hour or two of the day assembling those, and started tapping (cutting internal threads in) the holes. The rest of the tapping will take at least an hour tomorrow, maybe longer, since it's done by hand, not with a drill. If I'm lucky, I'll get backing plates tomorrow so I can start welding the stator barsets.

Christophe the cute Canadian engineer visited today. (Seems like there's eye candy all over the shop lately.) He was excited to see rings and a shell built... until I told him that they were for a smaller model and had been back-burnered for a while. We talked about what I still needed, and then about English. He understands that I'm trying to help make things easier for everyone by improving his (and Luc's) command of the language. I forgot to ask him about the ring assembly for the smaller model... some rings need more holes, some need fewer, and he really needs to assemble a ring by himself to see what a pain in the butt his design is.

Off to school. Ugh.

Double Time

2007-11-02T22:31:00.000-04:00

I know I shouldn't be, but I'm always amazed at how much faster tasks go when I have help doing them. The barset-building I was expecting to spend a day or two on by myself was done in five hours because I had Marcel working with me. I did the inlets by myself (because it's all welding, and Marcel doesn't weld), but that only took about two minutes per barset. That meant that I had some time to kill at the end of the day, so I asked Melvin what he needed help with.

I assembled inlets for our flat plates (completely different from the conical ones) and discovered that I enjoy everything about that task aside from FUSING THE &^%$#@! HOLES CLOSED!

The holes are 1/8" deep and 1/8" in diameter. They have to be fused in such a way that the backing material at the bottom of the hole melts into to the material from the piece with the hole. The tungsten electrodes we use are 3/32" in diameter. If the tungsten hits the metal or the weld pool, it becomes contaminated, shoots off sparks, gets a glob of metal on it, and lets the arc wander.

There are twelve holes per inlet. I did eight inlets. My hands shake. Guess how many electrodes I went through.

Ugh.

I wrote (with soapstone, which erases just like chalk) my wish list on the table before I left: rotor rings, rotor shell, stator rings, stator shell, stator spacers, and stator fixtures. Joe tells me I'll have the spacers late tomorrow, but I don't know about anything else. This conical set has a promised ship date of November 22nd.

Yeah. Right. Maybe if I get all of my parts tomorrow and teach Marcel how to weld... heh.

Damn It, Jim, I'm A Welder, Not A Dictionary!

2007-11-01T22:37:00.000-04:00

I got Marcel again today! He arrived just as I was prepping a new backing plate and fixture, so I was able to show him the efficient way to stack a barset from start to finish. He saw what changes he needed to make, and in no time he was stacking barsets exactly as quickly as I could weld them. Six hours of that, and we'd finished all but three barsets. I stayed for three hours after quitting time to finish those three sets (under an hour) and do the tacking and grinding that needed to be done on all 38 barsets.

Tomorrow I'll either be attaching inlets (wedge-like things that add to the parallelogram-shaped barsets to make them rectangular) to the sets I finished today or building sets for the stator. We're still waiting on both shells (there are "materials issues," says Joe) and spacers for the stator, but the spacers should only take a day or two, which is how long it'll probably take for me to build the barsets. We don't have parts for the stator fixtures, nor the backing plates to go in the fixtures, but those shouldn't take very long once Joe programs them into the laser.

Luc stopped by my table this morning for a translation. I tentatively confirmed his educated guess, but I wanted to be sure, so I told him to wait while I ran to my locker and brought out my French-English dictionary (mon dico). He looked a little surprised that I had it with me, but he also seemed very happy that he could have a more solid answer than my "uhh... je crois que oui."

I think I'm getting him a dico as an early Christmas present.

Happy Helper

2007-10-31T21:46:00.000-04:00

I got to train an assistant today. I don't know if he'll be helping me again, but I hope he will. Marcel is the new guy in blasting and shipping, and since things were slow in his department and I needed someone to put barsets together while I welded, he was given to me for four hours.

Marcel is a sweetheart. He flashes that brilliant smile of his all the time, he has a great personality, and he wants to be as good as he can possibly be at whatever he does. He shows great attention to detail and assimilates new information quickly.

This is going to seem strange, coming from someone who's obsessive-compulsive, but... I wish he were less obsessive-compulsive. I love that he wants to do a good job and get the barsets set up perfectly for me to weld, but he's so intent on making them perfect that it takes him forever to do each one. Fortunately I had a dozen barsets already welded and waiting for some extra tacking and grinding, so I worked on those while he gently tapped each blade and spacer into its proper position.

When I trained him, I was almost finished putting together a set and ready to get back to welding, so I only demonstrated enough that he got the idea and could be unsupervised until I was finished welding the set I was working on. If I get him again tomorrow, I think I'll have him watch me put together an entire set so he'll see how little he really has to do to get the job done.

Try, Try Again

2007-10-30T06:08:00.000-04:00

Joe, for all his experience and wisdom, is still only human. Humans make mistakes. Joe made the same mistake twice.

The specifics of it are a bit difficult to explain, but the gist is that when he designed blades for the rotor barsets, he shaped one end incorrectly on four blades. (That's four blades per barset, with 36 barsets on the rotor, plus two extra barsets just in case; 152 incorrect blades.) I showed him the problem, he chuckled at his mistake, and then he went back to the office to re-program the blades that needed to be replaced.

Eric, whom I affectionately call "LaserMan" in my head (because he operates the laser cutter), brought me the new blades. I broke them out, replaced the incorrect blades, and stacked a barset in a fixture. I looked at the set, shook my head, and went to the office to get Joe.

I showed him the barset with the "correct" blades. He looked at it for a moment, leaned over the table, put his head on his arm, and started laughing. "I can't believe I did that," he said, shaking his head and trying to stay lighthearted about the situation. "I'll go fix it, but the new blades might not be ready for a while. Break out the stator blades while you're waiting."

It took two or three hours for the new blades to be cut (five minutes to redesign the blades, ages in the cutting queue, and then just a few minutes under the laser), during which I nearly finished breaking out the stator blades. The new rotor blades fit properly this time, and I had a happy little geek moment with the stator blades.

There are 50 types of blades for this stator, with 38 blades of each type. Because we haven't built anything to use for sorting that many types of blades, I wrapped each type in gaff tape and wrote the blade number on the tape. There ended up being a duplicate set of one of the blade types: #42. I wrapped up both sets, wrote "42" on one, and "DON'T PANIC!" on the other.

Now where did I put my towel?

L'Animosité

2007-10-28T19:40:00.000-04:00

On Thursday, Luc spent a few hours at the worktable helping me break out blades and build sets. It's part of the management style of our Japanese super-parent company: managers should understand and know how to do their underlings' jobs. Every time someone walked past the table behind Luc, they glanced at him, looked at me, and rolled their eyes as if to say, "oh god, he's out here again? Good luck." It's starting to annoy me.

Joe has taken to calling the company "the frog pond," and complained yesterday about our Canadian engineer's imperfect command of the English language. Never mind that English is a second or third language for all of our Canucks. They're seen as the enemy because they don't speak the way we do.* Between the accent, the vocabulary, and the conjugation of verbs, they never had a chance.

When I was assembling the rings for the next rotor and stator last week, Joe gave me a page of instructions that Christophe (the engineer) had written. With the exception of a few words, his English is very good... much, much better than my French. I brought in my French-English dictionary yesterday and spent my break writing notes for Christophe, hoping that he'll see them for what they are: an attempt to make life a little easier for everyone. Nobody knows when he'll be back in the shop (he telecommutes from Quebec most of the time), but when he visits again I'll have to remember to give him the notes.

I need to pick up some language tapes next time I'm out shopping. I want to be able to say something more useful than "le singe est sur la branche."

* Let's just ignore the fact that phrases like "he don't know no better" come out of the mouths of the same people who say that the Canadians don't speak English properly.

Repeat Performance

2007-10-24T16:25:00.000-04:00

Remember when we had to scrap an entire set because the barset angle was off? Well, this time it wasn't the barset angle, it was the cutting angle.

Heh.

We also have a backlog of orders, but limited equipment, so we keep having to stop a job halfway through and start the next one because we're waiting on parts for the first one. Dan, Chuck, and I broke and built two sets and started breaking a third in about an hour and a half because we had no spacers. The good news for me is that the saw was being used to cut spacers for my conical barsets.

Joe told me that he'd have blades for the conical ready for me tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get to go back to my corner and build those barsets instead of hanging out with Dan and Chuck. Not that I mind them, I'd just rather be off on my own.

Gender Equality

2007-10-23T22:46:00.000-04:00

I went home early today. Between being a bit anemic, being exhausted, and being depressed, I felt like I was going to collapse if I didn't go home and sleep, so I found Paul and let him know that I was leaving. I wasn't really doing anything important today, since I'm waiting on blades and spacers for the stator, so it's not a big deal.

Earlier in the morning Paul took me aside and told me about a decision that had been made. There are four restrooms in the building: one ladies', one men's, and two unspecified, one of which is in the office. The office staff uses the one in the office, and everyone else uses the rest of them. Since men outnumber women at least five to one in the company and eight to one in the shop, I don't expect the "Ladies" sign to deter any of the guys.

Paul, though, seems to think that "those slobs" should learn how to read. He told me that he's going to put a lock on the door of the ladies' room and give us four women keys. I think it's a bit much, but I'm not going to object. It'll be nice to have my own restroom... the other three women are either in the office or on second shift, so I'll be the only one actually using it during the day.

I have a feeling the guys are going to be angry. Oh well.

Ring My Bell

2007-10-22T22:40:00.000-04:00

When a conical refiner comes out of the furnace and cools down, we perform two simple tests to see if it was made correctly: the eye test and the ear test.

The eye test is just a visual inspection. We make sure none of the barsets have detached from the shell, that none of the blades have popped out, and that none of the welds have cracked.

The ear test is more fun for me because of my musical background. I've always loved tapping metal things to hear the tone and clarity of their resonating frequencies, and that's just what we do with the conical. We take a small hammer or wrench and tap each barset. If every tap results in a bell-like ring, everything is good. If the sound is dull, there's something wrong.

The rotor I made last week sings.

*whew*

Like The Bunny With The Drum

2007-10-19T23:35:00.000-04:00

I worked for 13 hours today.

Good night.

Appreciation

2007-10-18T17:06:00.001-04:00

Joe is a great guy, but he's not much of a photographer. Here's the one picture that looks okay after a ton of post-processing in GIMP.

What I'm doing here is clamping the barset to the shell of the rotor. Once the barset is clamped, I weld it to the shell through those slots you see on the inside. Today I finished attaching the barsets, sealed gaps at the top and bottom, squirted brazing paste in all the right places, and crossed my fingers. It'll go in the furnace tomorrow and we'll see how it comes out on Monday.

Today's conversations with the supervisors made me feel even better. They really, really like me. They said things like, "the next time we have a meeting [with the bosses] about this project, you're going to be there. We want your input."

I told them about three weeks ago that I'd like to switch to second shift after I graduate in January, and they're fine with that, but they said they hoped I'd reconsider. They really want me on first shift so I can work with them instead of just finishing up whatever the person I train will have done earlier in the day. They even said that they could work out a special schedule for me (because my primary reason for wanting to go on second shift is so I don't have to get up before dawn... it's bad for my brain function, which is screwy as it is) so I can come in at, say, 9am and stay until 5 or 6pm. That's how much they want me on this project.

I have never felt so appreciated. It's awesome.

I promise to stop gushing soon. Really.

That's Amore

2007-10-18T06:01:00.000-04:00

I love my job.

I love being able to work on this big, unusual part all by myself. I love having the supervisors come over and tell me I'm doing a great job. I love hearing, "wow, you've gotten a lot done today!" I love knowing that my bosses appreciate me and have confidence in me.

Joe and Paul stopped by my table yesterday on their way to a meeting, looked at my work (I might have pictures soon), and told me that I was doing really well. Then Joe turned to Paul and said, "I told you so. I told you that putting her over here was a good idea."

Have I mentioned that I love my job?

I'm coming into the home stretch on the rotor. I have two more barsets (of 24) to attach to the cone, and then I can go around the top and bottom edges to seal the ends of the barsets. After that, I think it'll be ready to be pasted and go in the furnace. And that's when I'll cross my fingers and try to remember to breathe so my head doesn't explode while I wait to see if everything holds.

Wish me luck!

Coming Soon

2007-10-16T23:01:00.001-04:00

I haven't forgotten about the blog. I've just been very busy, very tired, and utterly incapable of turning memory into prose in any sort of comprehensible way.

I use big words when I'm a zombie, apparently.

New entry coming soon, I promise.

Cut and Cut Short

2007-10-13T11:08:00.000-04:00

Now that I'm working on the conical rotor, I can have as much overtime as I want, so I worked an extra three hours yesterday and came in today. Joe and I were the only ones who showed up, so it was blissfully quiet in the shop. I got two barsets finished and another assembled before Joe came over and told me that we had to leave.

Um. What?

He'd hit forty hours on Thursday, but needed to finish some important CAD work, which was the only reason he was in today. He finished his work in a little over two hours and didn't want to hang around doing nothing and not getting paid for it (he's salaried, so he doesn't get overtime pay), so he decided to send me home and close up the shop. As compensation, he signed off on four hours of work on my time card. Two hours at home while earning time and a half? I'm happy with that.

I also managed to injure myself today. In the conical barsets, there's one blade that needs some powerful persuasion before it will fit in its spot. (Read: I need to whale on the thing with a hammer until it pops into place.) I was beating the blade with the hammer, and the hammer slipped. It hit my finger, pushing it along the edge of the blade. Ow. Ow, ow, ow. I ran to the med kit, grabbed some antiseptic spray and a bandage, ran my finger under cold water for a minute, sprayed it, and wrapped it up. It stings a little, but I'll be fine.

As a reward for a) getting a job, 2) getting a bank account, and c) surviving my life-threatening boo-boo, I stopped at Bob's on my way home and got a spiffy new Carhartt jacket. I'm going to be toasty this winter.

Movin' On Up

2007-10-11T22:46:00.000-04:00

My classmate Dan, who just started on Monday, has been working on our big, important, overdue project: the conical. He's been going too slow for management's liking, and he hasn't really been enjoying the pressure and responsibility thrust on him in his first week with the company. We talked about it during lunch today, and both admitted that we'd like to switch jobs. He wants to do my mindless, repetitive barsets, and I want to do the unusual and exciting conical. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to Joe, and he said he'd think about it.

While Chuck and I were running sheets through the Timesaver, Paul came over and asked me how things were going. I told him that I enjoy what I'm doing, but Dan seemed to be unhappy, and I wondered if we might swap tasks. He thought for a minute and then said no, we were fine where we were. Okay, no problem, I figured it was worth a shot.

Five minutes later, Joe and Paul came up to me and told me to come into the office with them. After a moment of panic, I remembered that I've been doing my job, the guys like me, and I shouldn't have anything to worry about. I was right. Joe explained that Dan wasn't moving quickly enough and had expressed his dislike for the project, so they wanted to know if I'd like to take his place.

In my head: Oh my gods! Seriously?!? Hell yes!!!

Out of my mouth: "Absolutely."

So I'm the new Special Projects person. No change in title or pay, but because this order is so overdue, I can have as much overtime as I want just to get the darned thing finished. Plus, I get to work with filler wire, which is what I love most when it comes to TIG welding. Until now, the only wire work I've been doing has been patching cracked plates for Mike, and while that's fun, it's only once or twice a day for a minute or two. This is going to be more-or-less constant for as long as it takes to get the set finished.

I am ecstatic. And exhausted. G'night.

Just A Girl

2007-10-10T18:47:00.000-04:00

Today was eventful. Melvin nearly amputated my ear, Chuck accused me of talking too much, and I was informed that welding is a man's job. Two of these things happened as a result of the really annoying job we had to do today.

Most blades will pop out of their sheets fairly easily when you apply a little torque. The blades we had today? Not so much. They were big blades in relatively thick sheets, and over half of them had a sort of tab-like thing at the end that made breaking out more than two at a time nearly impossible. (On most jobs, I can grab at least four or five blades at a time.)

Now, Chuck has been with the company for over three years, and even he was complaining to Melvin about how difficult this set was to break out. I gave up a few sheets in and asked Chuck if I could start building sets while he broke out blades, and he said that was fine. He made a few comments about "the girl" not being able to do the tough jobs, but I've gotten used to him joking around like that, so I run with it and play the "weak little girl" card when I want help with something.

Melvin came over while we were enjoying our verbal ping-pong and joined in. "I don't want to seem prejudiced," he said, "but this really is a man's job." I wasn't sure if he was serious, but I laughed as if he had told a joke and rolled my eyes as soon as he turned his back. Chuck went over and talked to him a few minutes later, and apparently Melvin said that I didn't belong in the shop; I should be in the office. Again, I'm not sure if he was serious, but Chuck and I both thought it was hilarious.

We kept complaining about how hard it was to break out this set every time Melvin walked by, and finally, when Chuck was holding the next-to-last sheet, Melvin got sick of the bitching. He grabbed the sheet and started slamming it against the edge of the table over and over again. Melvin is usually a pretty mild guy, so this violent action was totally out of character for him. The really scary thing was that when he started doing this, blades went flying everywhere, including next to my head. He explained that this was the way a former employee used to break out difficult sets. Chuck and I spent the next five minutes laughing and assuring each other that losing an ear wouldn't a big deal. Not at all. Got two of 'em for a reason, after all.

Because I've finally gotten used to Chuck's singular brand of humor, I'm comfortable playing along and tossing it back at him. He spent my first two weeks talking about how he wanted to break me out of my shell, and now that I'm not afraid to joke around with him, I think he's eating his words. He was mock-boasting about how he'd astound people with his skills if he came to my school, and I told him that my instructors would put him in his place pretty quickly. He leaned around the welding booth and said, "woman, you talk too much!" I'm taking that as a good sign.

Tomorrow is payday. Huzzah!

Praise From Above

2007-10-08T17:27:00.000-04:00

Joe keeps giving me compliments, and it makes me happy to know that he thinks so highly of me. Today we were talking about the rotor/stator set that I finished on Saturday. The stator (which I worked on) came out of the furnace just fine, but the rotor splayed open like one of those blooming onions. Joe expressed his annoyance with Dale (who worked on both the rotor and stator) because of Dale's constant complaining about the MIG welder we have. Then he said, "you, on the other hand, said that if you'd had more time with the machine, you could work around its problems, and that spoke volumes."

I love knowing that my bosses are impressed with me. It kind of makes me wish I were planning on staying in Connecticut longer than a year or two. I really like this company.

My friend Dan from school started today, and they had him doing a little bit of everything. Because he has MIG work experience, they had him repair the blooming rotor first. Then he was passed around from station to station, doing at least three or four jobs over the course of the day. He cut spacers, he ran minisegment backing plates through the Timesaver, he did... something else I hadn't seen before... he was a busy guy. I, meanwhile, spent the day working on two barset jobs. Same old stuff, same old fun.

Overtime Adventure

2007-10-07T21:20:00.000-04:00

Friday afternoon, Joe asked me if I wanted to work on Saturday. Five hours at $22.50/hr? Heck yes, I want to work on Saturday! Even though I stayed up way too late Friday night, I had a fantastic day. Melvin taught me how to do the next step in the assembly process, but I only got about three pieces into the job before Joe came over and asked me if I could do MIG.

There was a new guy, Dale, working in "Special Projects" all week, and it's obvious he was having issues. He had the supervisors over at his station every five minutes every day. At the end of the day on Friday, he was removed from that station and sent over to do TIG work with the rest of us. The special project in question was a stator for a conical refiner system. The company has only made four conical rotor/stator sets in the last two years, and three of them have failed (one rather impressively), so this new one, which is two weeks overdue, is pretty important. It needs MIG beads for added strength in certain places, and there are very few people in the shop who know how to do MIG welding.

So when Joe asked if I could do MIG, I got very excited. He led me over to the stator, showed me what needed to be done, and told me I could take all day. I ran a few practice beads on some scrap metal, fiddled with the machine a bit, and dove in. I had a few issues with the machine, so the finished work didn't come out as well as I wanted it to, but it's not going to break.

Once I'd finished that, I got to learn another new skill: pasting. We squirt copper paste on the parts and put the parts in a huge oven where the copper fuses with the steel. The paste is applied with a pneumatic nozzle at the end of a two-foot-long hose. The stator is about two feet tall and three feet wide, and weighs several hundred pounds. Pasting it involved a pallet, a big lazy susan, a forklift, and a foreman with big muscles.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I hope I get to do special projects like that more often.

In Training

2007-10-05T19:51:00.000-04:00

Luc and one of the other Canadians were in the shop yesterday. They came around to see what everyone was doing, and had some of us train them to do our jobs. I got to train Luc to do part of my job.

The man is very neat and precise. He wants things to be just so. This is normally a good quality to have. When it comes to breaking blades and building barsets, though, it greatly reduces productivity. The first time he broke out blades, Luc was very careful to keep the piles of blades straight and neatly stacked. By the third time, he'd realized that it didn't really matter, so he allowed himself to get a little more sloppy.

I admire him for his compulsive straightening, and also for his drive to completely understand and master a task. After I explained (in Franglais, a clumsy mix of French and English) how to read the print and build a set, he built and re-built that set at least four times, just to be sure he knew what he was doing.

Earlier, when he and the other Canadian were standing at the work table, I said hello to Luc and asked him how he was doing (in French). I was on my way back to my station, so I didn't stop to introduce myself to the other man. A few minutes later, though, while one of the other guys was showing Luc how to tack backs (I'll learn how to do that soon), the guy (whose name I don't know... we'll call him Canadian With No Name) came over and asked me how I knew French. We had a quick little conversation before I got back to welding and he went to watch Luc.

It was nice to exercise my French vocabulary (I want to take classes again so I don't sound like a complete fool) and explain my job in such a way that, in under 10 minutes, Luc could do it correctly. I'll be training my classmate Dan to do the same thing on Monday, and if I can do it in Franglais, plain English will be no problem.

Correction of an earlier entry: the sander we use for sharpening electrodes does, in fact, have its own exhaust/dust collection system. I'm still delegating sharpening duties to my coworkers, though.

Crankypants

2007-10-04T06:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday started off as a good day. We got a lot of work done, I didn't weld long enough to get a headache, and my man came to visit me at lunch. The only frustrating bit at work was that we had a new guy "helping" us in the afternoon.

He's a nice guy. He's friendly. He tries very hard to do his job. But dear gods, he moves slower than sap. Chuck is no longer allowed to make jokes about how slowly I work, because (and I timed it to be sure) I work six times faster than the new guy. I try to be patient. I really do. I helped him and bit my tongue. But I wanted to tell him to go sit in the corner while I finished the job.

On the plus side, I got to watch Luc work for most of the day. A few days ago, Paul installed three 4x8 sheets of whiteboard-covered drywall in the maintenance area, which is a few yards away from my station. Yesterday Luc was up on a ladder putting colored tape and stickers on the board to form a grid for the new maintenance schedule chart. He was being very precise and obsessive about it, too, which made me happy.

Things fell apart once I got home. I was so tired that I nearly fell asleep at my desk, and I skipped dinner. By the time I got to school I was feeling mostly-dead (where's Miracle Max when you need him?) and didn't want to work. My friend Dan was feeling equally unmotivated, and we managed to kill about an hour and a half sitting there talking.

It wasn't until after I'd decided to at least get the slag cleaned off the hot pass I ran the other day that I realized the day students had "cleaned" the shop. My pipe had sprouted legs and walked away. Completely gone. At that point I gave up, went outside, sat down, and tried very hard not to let the fatigue and frustration get to me. I didn't burst into tears, hit things, or go home early, so I consider it a successful effort.

I don't have school next week (semester break), so I should be able to get plenty of sleep for the next week or so. Hopefully.

It Was A Day

2007-10-03T06:00:00.000-04:00

It took 19 man-hours (not counting what second shift did, which was probably 4 or 5 hours) to finish that huge set. Of my 9.5 hours, five were spent doing nothing but welding. Then I went to school, ground out a craptacular hot pass, re-ran it, and decided that helping a classmate cut the backing strip off of one of his pieces was more fun than chipping slag from my pipe.

Tomorrow, when I have some time to write, I'll tell you about my adventures at school. Sorry for the short post today... five straight hours of inhaling argon killed off a few brain cells, I think.

Health and Safety

2007-10-02T06:05:00.001-04:00

OSHA inspected the shop shortly before I was hired, and apparently we met their standards. We run a pretty clean, safe shop, so I'm not surprised. That doesn't mean I'm feeling 100% secure about my health at work, though.

Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding uses a tungsten or tungsten-alloy electrode (about the size of the graphite in a standard pencil) to carry electricity to the metal. The industry standard in the USA is 2% thoriated tungsten. It's been used for years, it's the least expensive type of tungsten electrode on the market... and it's radioactive.

Okay, it's not stirring-your-coffee-with-a-uranium-spoon radioactive, but it does put off enough alpha particles to cause concern. When the electrode is just sitting there, it's fairly harmless because the radioactive thorium is sort of encased in the tungsten. When it's being sharpened, however, the radiation is released in the dust and can cause lung damage.

The pdf version of the MSDS for 2% thoriated tungsten electrodes seems to be missing a snippet that shows up if you view the document as html:

Several studies carried out on thoriated tungsten electrodes have shown that due to the type of radiation generated, external radiation risks during storage, welding, or disposal of residues are negligible under normal conditions of use. On the contrary, during the grinding of electrode tips there is generation of radiation of radioactive dust, with the risk of internal exposure. Consequently, it is necessary to use local exhaust ventilation to control the dust at the source, complemented by respiratory protection equipment. The risk of internal exposure during welding is considered negligible since the electrode is consumed at a very slow rate. Precautions must be taken to control any risk of exposure during the disposal of dust from the grinding divices.

~~We don't have local ventilation for the belt sander we sharpen our tungstens with.~~ Edit: the sander does have its own dust-collection system. We don't take any special precautions when disposing of the dust... it goes in the trash with everything else. I don't think any of the guys in the shop even realize that they're dealing with radioactive material. It's just another piece of metal to them.

Welding is dangerous. If I hadn't accepted that fact, I wouldn't be in this trade. I know I'm going to get burnt and electrocuted, I know my lungs will never be clean again, and I'm not too worried about that. On the other hand, with so many other types of (non-radioactive) tungsten electrodes on the market, it seems like an unnecessary risk to continue using thoriated tungsten. It's been banned or strictly regulated in the rest of the world, but we continue to use it as if it were completely harmless.

I always get Chuck to sharpen my electrodes for me.

Love/Hate

2007-10-01T16:32:00.000-04:00

The health and safety entry is coming, I promise. I just wanted to tell you about today while my wrists are still aching.

Chuck and I finished welding a set from yesterday in about an hour and a half. Then we broke, built, spaced, and welded an itty bitty set (still 96 pieces, but only 4 types of blades per piece, and they were only 4" long) in about four hours. Then... it happened. Our priority board got a new hot job. Our string of 4-inchers was broken by a mammoth set that we barely made a dent in before quitting time.

The set (96 pieces, as usual) is almost 11 inches long and has 12 types of blades.

Twelve.

When sets have that many types of blades, the blades are nearly impossible to tell apart without fine scrutiny. It will probably take most of tomorrow for us to finish breaking out the blades, never mind build the sets.

Ow. Ow, ow, ow.

Save Time

2007-09-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

Our section of the shop has three Timesavers. A Timesaver is a huge belt sander with a conveyor belt. Slap your material on the conveyor, it gets pulled under the sanding belt, and then gently spit out the other side. Of our three, we only use two on a regular basis: the BIG ONE (for sheets) and the little one (for finished sets). Usually when we tell someone that there's a problem with the Timesaver, we mean the BIG ONE.

When I say BIG, I mean BIG. It's an older, bigger, non-computerized version of the widebelt model, and it's a good seven or eight feet tall. And it's finnicky. It needs to be cleaned (sprayed with a water-lubricant mixture) before and after every job because the steel dust and the lubricant/rust-inhibitor form sticky globs that block some of the parts from moving the way they're supposed to. When the (manual, not motorized) lift is blocked by gunk, it won't bring the conveyor belt close enough to the sanding belt, so the sheets won't come out the correct thickness.

Most of the guys don't bother cleaning the machine because it takes five minutes and needs to be done thoroughly. As a result, the gunk builds up, the lift stops working, and we have to go find Paul. This does not make Paul happy. In fact, it makes Paul really, really angry. He doesn't mind doing routine maintenance, but when it's a chronic issue that could be solved by the guys doing what they're supposed to do, he starts yelling and cursing.

It got so bad a few days ago that Paul started shouting at Melvin, telling him that he had to make sure the guys rinsed out the machine, and that if they didn't, he should fire them. That's how big an issue this has become. It's dying down, though. The guys clean the machine just enough for it to mostly work properly, and nobody calls Paul when they have problems. They just shrug and move on. It saves time.

Coming next: Health and Safety

Little Bitty Pretty One

2007-09-29T11:31:00.000-04:00

For over a week now we've been doing 8" barsets. Because they're so long, they need four beads across the back instead of three, and they're about an inch wider than the smaller sets. This means that they take longer to weld, so a 96-piece job takes Chuck and me a full day to complete.

Yesterday we caught a break. Finally. Two 4.5" jobs in a row. I love the short sets because they're much quicker... same number of pieces (96), but fewer blades, fewer spacers, and fewer welds. I broke out most of the blades for the first job and all of the blades for the second job while Chuck was cutting spacers, and between us we blazed through the first job in 5.5 hours and got the second job almost half-finished before second shift took over.

The only bad thing about the short sets is that they're a little too short. Because of the way the clamping station is set up, the little sets have to be off-center in the vise, which means that one edge is protruding from the side of the vise, but the other edge is set in a little bit. That makes it nigh impossible to weld both of the edges right-handed without unclamping the piece after doing most of the welds and then re-clamping for that last bead.

Fortunately, one of the skills I was forced to learn in my TIG training at Baran is ambidexterity. So instead of wasting time unclamping and re-clamping, I just do that last weld left-handed. My left-hand welds tend to be better than my right-hand welds, so I'm not sacrificing quality, just comfort. And even that gets better after a few dozen welds.

On a "hey, cool!" note, I just found the patent information for what we make. Papermaking refiner plates and method of manufacture at freepatentsonline.com.

Coming next: Save Time

WANTED

2007-09-28T22:15:00.001-04:00

I lied. I'm not going to write about how we somehow manage to get work done when half the bloody shop calls out on the same day. Why? Because that's pretty much all there is to it. People aren't there, we shift around and do our jobs plus their jobs, and one way or another, stuff is accomplished. Not really worthy of a full entry, is it?

So instead I'll tell you about something that happened before I was hired.

Part of the post-buyout restructuring of our happy little company was getting newer/better office equipment, including computers. From what I hear, there were a bunch (3? 6? The stories differ.) of brand new Dell computers, still in the boxes, sitting in the office, waiting for desk space to be cleared. The next day, they weren't there anymore. Not in the office, not in the shop, not anywhere in the building.

Several thousand dollars of brand-spanking-new, easily-fenced, complete-with-authentic-Windows-serial-keys personal computing technology walked out the door. Management was, of course, mighty upset. Police detectives were called in, and nearly everybody was questioned. Not questioned was the disgruntled man who had just been handed his walking papers.

The crime still hasn't been solved, people are still being questioned and re-questioned, threats of polygraph tests abound, and security cameras have been installed at all of the doors. It seems like all of the employees are sure Disgruntled Guy did it, but without proof, there's nothing to be done about it.

This is why I don't leave anything at work. You never know what's going to sprout legs and wander off.

Coming next: Little Bitty Pretty One

The Chopping Block

2007-09-27T21:36:00.000-04:00

For the most part, all of the jobs that come through my station are 96-piece jobs. Each job takes between 10 and 16 man-hours to complete. After putting in all of that work, it really sucks to watch the foreman toss all 96 pieces in the dumpster.

It wasn't our fault.

When we assemble barsets, the blades and spacers are offset by a specific angle. That angle turns rectangles into parallelograms and corresponds with the angle of the fixtures the barsets have to fit into. The angle is marked on the print we work from, and at the clamping station we have dozens of angle templates so we can arrange the blades properly.

Chuck and I had finished our part of the job and moved onto the next job when Melvin started cutting sets and trying to fit them into the fixture. They... didn't fit. The angle was wrong. "This is bad," said Melvin. "This is really bad." He grabbed the print, hunted through the angle templates for the one that matched the print, set up the clamping station for that angle, and checked a finished set. The angle was correct. The number on the print matched the number on the template, which matched the angle of the sets we'd made.

The good news: it really wasn't our fault. *whew*

The bad news: if it wasn't us, it must have been the print. Prints are prepared by Miss Priss, who refused to believe that the error was hers. She visited us, as did Paul, Joe, and Luc. I think in the end they decided it was the angle template that was wrong, so they scrapped the one we'd used and cut a new one. Then we had to re-do the job. A day (and a lot of material) wasted.

Word in the shop is that Miss Priss's job is in the paper already.

Coming next: Short-Staffed

Efficiency Eavesdropping

2007-09-27T05:51:00.000-04:00

About 20 feet from the worktable where I break blades and build sets is a little table next to a wall covered with charts and lists about productivity and efficiency. That table is where the supervisors (Paul and Joe), foremen (Melvin and Mike), and a girl I don't know much about (I call her "Miss Priss" in my head because she looks very stuck-up) have their daily meeting with Luc. Occasionally smaller meetings/conversations go on there, and if most of the machines are off and I'm at the worktable, I can sort of hear what's being said.

Yesterday Luc and Joe spent fifteen minutes talking about the division of labor in the shop, and how best to apply the skills of our current welders/assemblers and the one(s) starting in the next few weeks. I got the impression that Joe was trying to get Luc to approve hiring three or four more people so each person could focus on one task instead of, for example, the five tasks I do. I also got the impression that Luc was hesitant to agree, doing mental math to see whether the income from increased productivity would balance out the wages of three or four more employees.

Luc is in a difficult position. He's seen as the enemy, both because his English isn't flawless and because his job is to rock the boat. The supervisors are trying to work with him, but I can tell that they get frustrated when he doesn't agree with them. Paul and Joe have been at this job for a long time, they know each stop on our little assembly line, they can do our jobs, they know what each employee's skills are, and... Luc doesn't. He looks at numbers. He makes decisions for the company based on those numbers. It remains to be seen whether his decisions turn out to be good ones.

Coming Next: The Chopping Block

The Good, The Bad, and The Dreamy

2007-09-26T16:27:00.000-04:00

Now that I've told you about Chuck (who was out today, thank the gods), let me tell you about three other personalities I interact with on a daily basis.

The Good: Paul is my supervisor, and a pretty cool guy. He was the one who told me during my interview that, even though the rest of my references weren't welding-related, the name of my instructor (who used to work here and was very well-liked) was more than enough. In addition to being in charge of the shop, he's also in charge of maintenance. It's that part of his job that has the potential to make him angry (our big Timesaver has been more of a Timewaster lately), but he likes me enough that I can always get a smile out of him.

The Bad: Larry is a suit. I'm not sure what his official title is, but he wanders through the shop every other day or so. He falls into the annoying-doddering-old-fool category, and I try not to make eye contact in the hope that he'll keep walking and not stop to talk to me. I had the misfortune of having to fill out tax and confidentiality forms with him on my first day, and I think I began to hate him in the first two minutes.

The Dreamy: Luc is another suit, but zounds, he looks good in a suit. He's our efficiency expert, sent by the parent company's Quebec office. He speaks just enough English to tell people what to do, but just little enough that most of the guys bitch about how nobody can understand him. I made his day during my interview when I spoke to him in French, and I love hearing him talk, no matter what language he's using. It's lovely to have a tall, handsome Canadian say "bonjour" to me every morning.

There are more good people in the shop than bad ones, so I'm happy. Tomorrow I get my first paycheck (for 8 days' work), try not to fall asleep while welding, go home, take a shower, watch Samoa beat the USA at rugby, and then get a full night's sleep for the first time in three days.

Coming Next: Efficiency Eavesdropping

All-Leather Cow Interior

2007-09-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

Y'know that Denis Leary song? I've decided that it's the new theme song for one of the guys at work. We'll call him Chuck, because that's his name. For about the first week, I was so annoyed by him that I considered going to management and asking to work with someone else. Now that it's been nearly two weeks, I've learned to let most of what he says go in one ear and out the other. Having a slight hearing problem makes this easier.

He's not a mean-spirited guy. He jokes around a lot, but it takes a while to learn when he's joking and when he's being serious. He sees it as his duty to gently haze all of the new-hires. One of the other guys in the shop heard Chuck playfully picking on me for not working as quickly as he does and said, "well, it's nice to know you don't play favorites, Chuck. You give everybody the same hard time."

At first I thought Chuck was sexist. When he wasn't picking on me for being slow, he was picking in me for being a girl. Statements like "men are never wrong" and "women slow everything down" come out of his mouth on a regular basis. It took a few days for me to realize that he wasn't serious, he was just trying to get a reaction out of me. He's as big a fan of Equal Opportunity as your average liberal, and got angry at some guys who work for his uncle's construction company because they refused to work with the two women on the crew. So... not sexist, just pushing those buttons to see what I'll do.

He's actually turning out to be a pretty nice guy. He has some warped ideas, though. His ideas about alcohol amuse and worry me at the same time. Chuck is known for drinking a lot on the weekends. A lot. He boasts about going through a 30-pack of beer in an evening. One day when he was going on about the wonders of beer, I shook my head and told him that his liver was in trouble if he kept drinking like that. He protested that his liver was fine. After all, he said, beer is good for your liver! It flushes everything out! He'd had 13 beers in three hours the night before, and he felt fine, so there's nothing wrong.

That was the moment when I decided that smiling and nodding is the best way to deal with him when I disagree with him. It keeps my blood pressure out of the red zone and my body in the vertical position. (If I roll my eyes too much, I get dizzy and fall over.)

Even though I'm getting used to him, I still wish I could work with someone else. Chuck is the person I work with all day, every day, and I would love a change of scenery. His green plaid "two-baby belly" (as one of the second shifters puts it) is something I'd be happy not to see every day.

Coming next: The Good, The Bad, and The Dreamy

People Are People

2007-09-24T17:02:00.000-04:00

Y'know how airlines over-book flights, assuming some people won't show up? The company I work for has been over-hiring welders, assuming some people will quit right away. And that's just what happened last week.

They hired an old-timer (whose name I forgot about 12 seconds after he introduced himself to me) and he started last Monday. He worked hard and was very friendly. He and I are from the same town, so we chatted about schoolteachers we'd both had. Having that kind of conversation with someone who's easily 20 years my senior was weird, let me tell you.

On Friday he seemed upset. About three hours into the shift, he went to our foreman and asked if welding the same type of part over and over again was all he was going to do. The foreman said yes, and the guy packed up his stuff and walked out.

I was surprised. It's obvious when you walk through the shop that it's a production shop. This guy looked like he'd been welding for a long time, so he should have known what the deal was before he accepted the job. My guess is that he didn't think the pay suited the workload. Most of the new-hires are starting in the $13-$15/hr range, and churning out a LOT of pieces. I weld about fifty pieces an hour, but they're the smallest components of what we make, so nobody else has that high a piece-per-hour ratio.

If you don't want mind-numbing, repetitive work, this job is not for you. Fortunately, this is exactly the sort of work I like, so as long as the lack of sleep doesn't kill me before I graduate, I'm keeping the job.

Coming next: All-Leather Cow Interior

Breaks In the Monotony, Cracks In the Pieces

2007-09-23T01:34:00.000-04:00

Occasionally I get a break from my production work, and I get to do something fun. The foreman of the other half of the shop (Mike) and one of the supervisors (Joe) discovered cracks in four of the fan-shaped things (I have no idea what they're called) in the space of two days, and they've come to me for patch jobs. The first time Mike and Joe came to me, I think it was just because I was closest to the entrance to their part of the shop and happened to be welding at the time.

Friday, though, Joe brought in a part while I was over at the work table breaking blades. He called me over while he walked to my welding station to put the part down. One of the other guys was at my station tacking something, and when he saw Joe, he volunteered to stop what he was doing and patch the piece. Joe said, "no, I'll wait," and smiled at me. I made the repair and got his nod of approval, so apparently I'm now the repair girl.

I'm really proud of the quality of my patch welds. When welding stainless steel, the ideal bead color is yellow-gold. That means that the heat and speed are balanced, so the weld is solid. Once I reminded myself how to weld with wire (instead of just fusing, which is what I do the rest of the time), my welds came out yellow-gold. That made my day.

I love doing repairs because the job requires skill, unlike most of the work I do. One of the pieces I worked on had been patched before by someone else, who, to quote Joe, had done "a piss-poor job" of it. It's nice to know that, for this task, I'm more skilled than some of the guys who have been there for a while. I hope it means that I'll get to do more repairs and maybe move onto more interesting parts of the production line when they hire more new people. (One will start in a week and a half; a classmate of mine.)

Coming next: People Are People

What I Do, In A Specific Sort of Way

2007-09-22T10:54:00.000-04:00

Once you know how to weld, you can build just about anything made of metal. Welders make and repair buildings, machinery, pipelines, cars, planes, ships, submarines, spaceships, boilers, drilling rigs, bridges, and more. We can even work under water, if we're so inclined (I am most definitely not), though most of us stay on dry land. I've run into a lot of welders who refuse to do what I do, which is work in a production shop. They can't stand the monotony. And that's fine. To each his own, and all that. But I like my job. This is what I do:

This is the company I work for, and the bunches of blades in those fan-shaped things are what I make. Sheet steel comes into the building and goes to our massive (about 20' square) laser cutter. It mostly-cuts the blades for each job, and then the blades come to my area, Barset Assembly. My coworker and I run the sheets through a Timesaver to get the burrs from the cutting process off. Then we break the blades out of the sheets, arrange them by type (some sets have five types of blades, others have 10 or more), and "build" the sets by assembling the blades in the correct order. We put spacers between the blades and then put each barset in a clamp. I put on my welding helmet and fuse three to five lines across the back of the barset (depending on the set's size) and one line along each cross-section edge. The sets get run through another Timesaver to make sure everything's even, and then they go on to the next step in the process... which I don't watch because I'm too busy building more sets.

It's mindless work, for the most part, and that's one of the things I like about it. I can zone out a bit and not screw anything up, and the counting I have to do when building sets makes my obsessive-compulsive side happy. The worst part of my job is having to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning. I haven't had to do that on a regular basis since basic training, and I only lasted about a week there, so it wasn't regular... it was more like a really bad vacation. On the plus side, I get out of work at 3:15, so I have plenty of time to do errands and enjoy the daylight. School days suck, though. Get up at 5, get to work at 7, get out of work at 3:15, go home and make/eat dinner, get to school just before 6, and get home at 10:30. It's three days a week, it's exhausting, and I have about four more months of it.

I can do this. The education is worth it, the paycheck is worth it, and proving my pessimistic, unsupportive mother wrong is worth it, too.

Coming next: Breaks In the Monotony, Cracks In the Pieces

How It Began

2007-09-21T18:15:00.000-04:00

My adult life has gone like this:

I tried college. It didn't work.
I tried college again. It didn't work.
I tried working in retail. It didn't work.
I tried enlisting in the Air Force. It didn't work.
I tried committing suicide. It didn't work.
I started welding school. It worked.

I'm a creative person. I like working with my hands, building things, repairing things, and seeing tangible results of my work. I am not cube farm material. I like getting my hands dirty. I've spent years looking for the right skills... ones that will pay the bills while allowing me to be artistic. Welding fits. The pay is good, the work is fun, and I can use my skills to make art on the side.

I began the welding program at Baran Institute of Technology in October of 2006, intending to finish in one year by taking classes full-time. Nine months in, I decided to switch to part-time, delaying my graduation until January of 2008. Once I had all of this free time, I started looking for jobs. I'm confident in my skills in school, where I know what everyone else is doing, but not knowing how my skills measured up in the "real" world scared me. I procrastinated. A lot.

Two weeks ago, I finally applied for a job at a company one of my teachers used to work for. Their decision was quick, and I started last Wednesday. It took me a few days to get into the swing of things, but now I'm comfortable and confident in my abilities. I like my work, I like most of my coworkers (more on that later), and in spite of getting very little sleep, life is good.

Coming next: What I Do, In A Specific Sort of Way.

Hello, world!

2007-09-21T17:56:00.000-04:00

Hiya! I'm Lilith, crazy chick who does a little bit of everything, and I just got a job as a TIG welder. I don't want to clutter my knitting blog with tales of work, so I'm putting all of the welding drama here. Enjoy your stay, and don't stare directly into the light.