Distraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.