Praise From Above

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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.