Co worker appreciation thread…. I guess.

[RaisedByWolves]

Yeah, coworkers!

Our edm operator was struggling making a die steel and did a do over.

We come in this morning and there’s a note on my partners bench (edm gal is on nights) asking us to start the heat treat oven so it’s ready for her when she comes in today.

My shift mate remarks “Why don’t you tap that one hole and wrap the part and cook it for her so it will be cool enough for her to finish tonight” and hands me the steel.

OK, I have nothing pressing to do so I fire up the oven and do some detail work on the steel, wrap it and put it in the oven, two hours work tops.

3hrs later it’s ready to come out but we’re slammed with several presses down and multiple changeovers to do.

So we organize things so we have a 1/2 hour window to pull the steel and we get that done.

This caused some chaos on the production floor but we’re juggling jobs so….

We get everything handled and go back to project work and little miss edm comes in.

We’re all “hey we got your steel cooked and all ready for you” and she’s just looking at us like a deer in the headlights.

She reply’s “No the steel is still in the machine”.


Here my guy blur (he’s nervous as a cat and never stops moving) picked up and handed me the bad steel thinking it was the revised one and I did all that work for nothing.

A day of light chaos brought on by good intentions.

So how’s your day going?

 

[C-Bag]

No good deed goes unpunished

 

[C-Bag]

I think it’s interesting that this happens to others. Every time I had some slack time and I would try and help someone because there was what seemed like calm air, the excrement would hit the fan and I’d be swamped immediately. After many of these disasters I decided it was best to just bath in moment of calm than tempt the fates. In maintenance there are very few of those times especially when in production. After I was able to tackle the worst offenders on the off season my production days were spent walking the whole shed and cold storage looking and listening. Much better than like the first couple of seasons when it felt like riding herd on a whirling dervish about blow and running from one blowout to the next.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

I think it’s interesting that this happens to others. Every time I had some slack time and I would try and help someone because there was what seemed like calm air, the excrement would hit the fan and I’d be swamped immediately. After many of these disasters I decided it was best to just bath in moment of calm than tempt the fates. In maintenance there are very few of those times especially when in production. After I was able to tackle the worst offenders on the off season my production days were spent walking the whole shed and cold storage looking and listening. Much better than like the first couple of seasons when it felt like riding herd on a whirling dervish about blow and running from one blowout to the next.

I've found "Looking busy" to be very helpful in these situations.

Oh, I'm working, but its on a pet project, or G work and both of these can relieve stress.

Made a mini drill press/grinding vise, endmill sharpening jig, many many sets of parallels, several types of vice stops and other things, all in 10 to 30 min intervals. As long as there was an open machine or the job didn't require a "No break" setup it was all good and kept me out of other peoples messes.

Today I volunteered, but it was a job where I took on the "Hard part" and left the other guy to do the straight up die work.

There was two specially shaped bars that got mangled and either needed remade or straightened, and Ive gotten quite good at straightening pretzel's.

Trapped them in the vise of a huge disused milling machine and used the power feed on that machine (Up/down/left/right) and a pipe wrench to manipulate them back into shape.

Had to take the one piece back and persuade it finely into position with a sledge hammer, but everyone was impressed at how straight they were and how fast I got it done.

 

[C-Bag]

I've found "Looking busy" to be very helpful in these situations.

I was often the only mechanic and I don’t smoke so it was all about keeping moving which was fine with me. As long as everything is going smoothly and no stopping and I was right there when something broke, they had no idea what I was doing. We should have had at least a lathe and mill but the supposed college graduate boss thought having a complete tool box was somehow cheating. He was more impressed with brute force than actual repairs. The guys in the packing house were more impressed with me than the boss.

The one thing he was impressed with but he never told me directly was on the hi tech fruit sizer when we did de Anjou pears they would somehow get on one of the three huge main chains on the return side and when it got to the chain wheel it would cause that chain to jump time. Talk about chaos. The first time it happened we had no clue. It was under warranty so a tech came out and I assisted him and that’s when we figured it out. Jumped the one chain back and all good. When it did it again I knew how to jump it back but of course it did it at like the end of the day or super busy or when other stuff dumped. So out of scrap UHMW , some springs and some aluminum I made basically some spring loaded slippers that rode the chains before the chain wheels and flipped the pears off the chains. Boss couldn’t wait to tell the sizer makers he had fixed their bad design. I would have killed for a simple machine shop in that job. Didn’t even have a drill press