Cables, Coffee, Cycles, and Cocktails

[dtel]

55 minutes ago, geezin' said:

 

 

Ever cut 3" aluminum billet with a carbide tipped table saw?

Not with that kind of saw, skillsaw, reciprocating or cutoff saw yes but not with a table saw. I really don't fool with aluminum anymore, I did a little in the past, but not much because I can not weld it with my machine and don't want to get into that, maby one day?  I like woodworking mostly and making things with steel when needed.

[dtel]

4 hours ago, babadono said:

5 hours ago, Dave1291 said:

Avoid using a comma when a semicolon is needed:

Incorrect: The cow is brown, it is also old.
Correct: The cow is brown; it is also old.

I stand; corrected

No need to stand, take a seat dude, relax. 

[NADman]

4 hours ago, geezin' said:

 

 

Ever cut 3" aluminum billet with a carbide tipped table saw?

On 6/30/2021 at 3:37 PM, DizRotus said:

 

How alarming and sad to think of those unable to escape such dangerous heat.

 

Ever use a plasma cutter?

[dtel]

34 minutes ago, NADman said:

 

Ever use a plasma cutter?

I have never, I just have a standard cutting torch.

[OO1]

11 hours ago, JohnJ said:

Looking like plan A for me has fizzled. That's not really bad except for some stressed immediate family dynamics.

Plan B will have me 5 miles south of the Blue Ridge Parkway close to VA. Got my fingers crossed; it's 4 acres with a good spring and fast moving creek commencing from it. Evergreens and hardwoods. Got my scout/partner in crime checking it out.

Best of luck --4 acres --peace and quiet

[Islander]

17 hours ago, dtel said:

No but I could imagine how loud that would be, depending on the size of the sheet I couldn't afford it anyway. 

 

That was the other thing I was hearing.  When I started working in one of the public utility powerhouses, our first assignment was to design and construct our own tool buggies.  They were rolling tool cabinets, with thick red rubber glued onto the tops, and a vise that we’d get from Stores.  Since we’d design them to suit our height and the size of the items we’d typically work on, every one was a bit different.  One even had 6 wheels, rather than the usual 4.

 

The tool buggies were much sturdier than normal shop tool cabinets, because they had to stand up to being carried several hundred metres on the blades of a forklift (it was a big worksite) and still have the doors and drawers operate properly, with nothing bent or warped.  The rubber-covered steel top was your work surface, so it had to withstand the occasional hammer blow.  Most of the buggies were built of a frame of 1/2” or 3/4” angle iron, with a 1/8”-thick steel skin.  The wheels were available at the Stores building, and once you knew how many drawers you needed, and which sizes and shapes, you’d go to the carpenter shop, where they’d be built to your specs out of 1/2” plywood.  Some of these measurements may be a bit off, but there’s a couple of subwoofer boxes in the way right now, and I should be packing it in for the night, instead of shifting stuff and measuring stuff.

 

An older English millwright was assigned to mentor me for the first few months, until I got the hang of the job.  This was important, because mistakes were not only costly, they could be deadly.  As well, millwrights trained  to do this kind of work were very rare, so pretty much everyone, including me, needed some mentoring at first.  I started to suspect that he wanted to set me up, because of a few small oddities in the way he acted toward me.  One clue was what happened in the welding shop, where the sheet metal was stored.  I asked him which metal I should use for the skin of the tool buggy, and he indicated the stainless steel, with the near-mirror B9 finish.  I was a bit dubious, but he assured me it would be fine, then he left me to it.

 

Once I got the metal in place on the bandsaw and started cutting the sheet (maybe 4’x6’ in size; I’m not positive now, since it was more than 30 years ago) of stainless, and its horrid shriek echoed across the shop, nearly everyone stopped what they were doing (at least, it felt like that) and one of the old near-his-pension welders came over to demand whether I knew what that material cost.  That kind of centred me out, and once I loaded the buggy up with tools (It weighed around half a ton when full.  Good thing I chose the heaviest-duty wheels in stock.) and started  pushing it around the building, it, and I, became much more visible.  It was a rolling example of Excessive Consumption of Taxpayers’ Money, which was not what Pat the Newbie had in mind when he started to work there.  That jerk played me well.

 

As time went on, the shiny tool buggy became part of the furniture/wallpaper (the building had neither furniture not wallpaper, but you get the idea) of the powerplant, and I got to be known as a regular guy.  Four years later, one-third of the 28,000-strong Thermal Division workforce (around 10,000 millwrights, electricians, welders, forklift operators, office workers, and so on) was laid off, thanks to a big new nuclear powerplant coming on line, which made our coal-fired plant redundant.  There were no transfers to Hydro or Nuclear Divisions available.  When I asked the foreman if I could take my tool buggy to my next job, he said, “Why not?  It’ll only be gathering dust around here.”, so he wrote me an authorization to show Security when I took it through the gates on an old trailer that I had.  At my new work, a forklift was used to unload it.

 

A few years later, I got injured in a highway crash and took early retirement, so I got a friend with a truck with a power lift gate to load it up and bring it to my apartment, where it became a TV stand at the foot of the bed.

 

I could write more about my wonder tool buggy and the shriek of stainless steel being cut with a bandsaw, but I think this is way too long as it is.  Thanks for your patience in reading this far.

[Islander]

On 7/20/2021 at 3:42 PM, dtel said:

No need to stand, take a seat dude, relax. 

 

If you work your arse to the bone, what does that leave you with?  A bony arse.

[Islander]

17 hours ago, geezin' said:

 

 

Ever cut 3" aluminum billet with a carbide tipped table saw?

 

No, since I nearly always worked with steel, and very rarely used a table saw.  Of course, motorbike engines are made of aluminum, but you would not typically find a table saw in a dealership Service Department.

[OO1]

3 hours ago, Islander said:

 

 Thanks for your patience in reading this far.

cool story -

[dtel]

6 hours ago, Islander said:

wonder tool buggy

Most new people get played and you were new. An old line was to send a new person to the tool room to get a sky hook just so they would make fun of him.

 

 

There are YouTube videos of people sending wives or kids into a parts store to get blinker fluid, they come out embarrassed. 

[babadono]

So now it's    Colonoscopy II....to boldly go where man has only gone once before

Doc found something in my poop he didn't like,  yea I know TMI.

I told him rarely if ever do I find anything I DO like.

[BigStewMan]

1 hour ago, dtel said:

There are YouTube videos of people sending wives or kids into a parts store to get blinker fluid, they come out embarrassed. 

sounds like the stuff we pulled on the new guys on the ship.   sending them to the engine room to get relative bearing grease. They sent this one guy down the engine room three times for a bucket of steam.  They'd tell him to hold the bucket tight against his chest, then he'd get outside and they'd yell at him for letting all the steam escape. There wasn't a lot of clearance when he sailed under the Mackinaw Bridge and it does look awfully close as we approached it.  But, the new guys would be on "Mast Lowering Detail."  (spoiler alert:  the mast doesn't come down). these are normally 18 - 19 year olds fresh out of bootcamp and still terrified. Plus, the ship's captain was even in on the gag ... he'd come running out of the bridge yelling that we only had 1000 yards to the bridge and wondering what is taking so long to lower the mast. they'd hand tool belts to the newbies (we called them Boots, because they were fresh outta boot camp), give them a tool belt, tell them to start climbing; but never giving them any further instructions, just yelling at them to "HURRY."

They wrapped people in foil to "calibrate the radar."  They gave people boot hooks and had them stand at the bow because we were nearing the "Mail Buoy" and this person needed to retrieve our mail. 

I was fortunate ... although only 18, I had some street smarts. and felt something was different in the atmosphere one morning. I didn't know what was going to happen; but I knew something was going on. when they told me I was on mast lowering detail I snapped back "don't try to pull that on me."  and the guy said, "ok; but keep your mouth shut and don't spoil it for the other guys."  Spared the embarrassment. 

[Islander]

1 hour ago, babadono said:

So now it's    Colonoscopy II....to boldly go where man has only gone once before

Doc found something in my poop he didn't like,  yea I know TMI.

I told him rarely if ever do I find anything I DO like.

 

As Tommy Chong once said to the Customs officer, as he prepared to do a body cavity search, “If you find anything up there, it’s yours!”

[BigStewMan]

1 hour ago, babadono said:

So now it's    Colonoscopy II....to boldly go where man has only gone once before

Doc found something in my poop he didn't like,  yea I know TMI.

I told him rarely if ever do I find anything I DO like.

hope the results are good. I'm due in 2026 ... last one I had was in 2016 and the doctor said "See you in 10 years."

[OO1]

3 minutes ago, Islander said:

 

As Tommy Chong once said to the Customs officer, “If you find anything up there, it’s yours!”

what a crappy job  

[dtel]

1 hour ago, babadono said:

So now it's    Colonoscopy II....to boldly go where man has only gone once before

Doc found something in my poop he didn't like,  yea I know TMI.

I told him rarely if ever do I find anything I DO like.

My doctor was talking about that last week when I was in there. I told her have you done it and she said no, I told her if I go you need to go, she said you should start at age 50, I'm 46. 

She said every 10 years, I said this is the one shot if I really have to.  

[Islander]

1 hour ago, dtel said:

Most new people get played and you were new. An old line was to send a new person to the tool room to get a sky hook just so they would make fun of him.

 

 

There are YouTube videos of people sending wives or kids into a parts store to get blinker fluid, they come out embarrassed. 

 

Thanks.  I should have looked at it that way, but I was nearly forty then, so maybe my sense of humour at being pranked was no longer what it should have been.  All ended well, because I still have my wonder buggy, and it comes in really handy at times, like when I had to cut and bend steel strips for the mounting bases for the K402 horns.

 

While I was building the buggy (it took a few days), I was proudly describing it to my girlfriend, along with the tools you were expected to have on your first day.  You’d be given the list the day you were hired, and it was up to you to pay for the tools.  Most of my tools were metric, so I needed to buy a set of SAE-sized wrenches and a 0-1” micrometer.  I already had almost everything else.  She commented that it sounded like I’d be happily pushing my toy box around the plant, and she was kind of right.

[dtel]

7 hours ago, Islander said:

No, since I nearly always worked with steel,

Same here, in another life, so long ago I never had kids I was a shipfitter.  Shipfitter= The people who cut, move and shape steel and with any luck end up with a ship. 

[OO1]

2 minutes ago, dtel said:

 I was a shipfitter. 

you sure know how to build a Smoker big enough to feed an Army

[Buck115]

57 minutes ago, BigStewMan said:

sounds like the stuff we pulled on the new guys on the ship.

 

On the Air side we would send the new squadron guys out for "A Bucket of Prop Wash" or "100 Feet of Flight Line". 🤣