Zeke's Bad Day

Northwestern Highway is a road which runs at a northwesterly angle away from Detroit. How urban planners determine road names is amazing. 

Several years ago me Uncle John who me Pops called Zeke had a bad day on that road.

He was bringing one of me Grandpa Joe's welding machines back from a job, towing it behind a car. As he pulled away from a traffic light, he felt the sudden jump of his vehicle losing weight. It had indeed lost weight: the machine he was towing had slid off its trailer and was sitting serenely blocking the right lane on Northwestern. All 2,000 pounds of it just sat there, quietly unconcerned with the world around it, just not caring one blip about the trouble it had caused.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the bolts which held the welder to its trailer had weakened and broke. Yet all was well...several hours later, after involving a crane, many police officers, an uncountable number of irate commuters, and an Uncle John happy to actually get home before dark. It could have been worse, I suppose, but it was not a good day.

Weekend Warriors

Yesterday I spoke of the one Friday - and it was only one, I swear! - where we refused to answer the phone after 3:30. There was a reason for that, beyond the obvious ones. Me Uncle John who we call Zeke summed it up well: nothing good ever happens after 4 o'clock on Friday. That's when the Weekend Warriors come out of the woodwork.

Now, I'm not against anyone having additional income streams. Indeed most of my adult life I've worked a second job trying to make ends meet. Further, this was much more of a problem when we still rented welding equipment. Welders were much more difficult to deal with than drain snakes, for reasons I will not bore you about. My blogs can bore you well enough without added exposition, although I do readily offer that service. You're welcome.

Anyway, there were guys who we only heard from late on Fridays, and to a tee they were all nuisances. One would order a welder delivered through rush hour traffic an hour away, and want the driver to wait while he did a 15 minute weld which typically extended to 45. Another would actually bring his work to the old barn, pay Joe for use of a machine right then and there only to take two hours for a 'quick' job, leaving at least one of us to close at 7 or 7:30. A third would have a simple request: take a welder to an industrial site in the wee hours of a Sunday morning for a day job, and ask us to pick it up late, all too often very late, on that same day. And so on and so forth.

We would do it, because that's how we did it forty, fifty, and sixty years ago. It would all start with a phone call after 4 on a Friday. We will not do that anymore. Thankfully, I will add. Although I do put in enough hours on weekends myself, I at least don't affect anyone else doing it.

Fried Cloyce

Me Pops liked to tell stories of his days in the field as he put it, his days going out to job sites to work on me Grandpa Joe's welders. They are some great stories, not the least reason because so many are true. Life is fun.

He told me a few times of when he went to pick up an electric powered welding machine which had not yet been unhooked from the power source. He went to find the job foreman, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, to get it taken care of.

It happened that day that Cloyce was in a mood. Everything had been going poorly for him, and that welder still being hooked up was another poke with a sharp stick. He stormed to the tool crib, demanding the crib manger give him a screwdriver. Cloyce was going to disconnect the machine himself. The crib guy smiled weakly as he gave him a screwdriver. Cloyce and me Pops went out to the welder.

Now it should be noted here that those old Hobart electric welders ran off 440, three phase power, about 4 times household current. They could kill you bad if you weren't careful. As such, insulation was important to your work.

Now, Dad had seen that Cloyce had been given a fully metal screwdriver, and the sheepish grin on the crib manager's face suggested that he knew what he had done. So Pops would have stopped Cloyce before anything bad could have happened. Still, he would let things play out.

Cloyce had walked a few feet before looking at the tool he had. Seeing it was uninsulated he screamed, "They're trying to fry me like a piece of bacon!" He stormed back to the crib, slamming that metal screwdriver onto the counter and demanding a new one. All in colorful language.

Pops and the crib manager just smiled.

Air Head

There was once an employee at the the old barn, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who sometimes couldn't grasp simple ideas. One such concept was the difference between weight and pressure.

We had a lot of trailer mounted welding machines which had pneumatic, that is, air filled, tires. The typical pressure in a properly inflated tire was 32 psi, or 32 pounds of air pressure per square inch. 

One day I had my bicycle at the Shop. The tires were low, so I turned on the air compressor to fill them. "What do they take?" Cloyce asked me.

"50 psi," I answered.

"What?" a stunned Cloyce demanded. "How can those small tires take more air than a welder tire?"

"They don't take more air," I responded. "They have a higher air pressure."

"But we put 32 pounds of air in the welder tires. You just said you put 50 pounds of air in the ones on your bike."

"There's a difference between the volume of the air in something and the pressure the air creates within it, Cloyce."

He pondered that a moment, but it was obvious he didn't get it. Cloyce walked away shaking his head. "How can you put 50 pounds of air in a small tire but only 32 in one a lot bigger?" he was asking himself.

We would talk about it from time to time, and he even asked me Pops to explain it, but Dad couldn't get through to him either. I guess science just wasn't Cloyce's strong suit.

The Keys to the Kingdom of the Shop

How many of you have old keys hanging around? Maybe they're on your key ring, or perhaps in your junk drawer. At the Shop, we have keys hanging on nails right inside the office door, most of which haven't been used in ages. 

Some are the keys to cars which have long met the compactor.  I know that one key is for the last flatbed truck we had for delivering welders. That truck's been gone 35 or 40 years. We also still have the key from a 1961 Ford delivery truck. Interesting thing about that one: me Grandpa Joe bought it off of Seven-Up, the soda pop company. He didn't bother removing the logo, simply painting over it. You could see the Seven-Up image underneath the red of the driver's door.

Smaller keys are old shop locks for padlocks which are who knows where. Most of them have not been touched since well before Pops died, and he's been gone coming up on eleven years.

Why don't we get rid of them? I dunno. It's habit to have them there I suppose. One key is attached to a key ring which has the baby from the first Incredibles cartoon. That's, what, 2004? The baby is no longer bald but has a nice head of dust hair. It's to be expected I suppose, after hanging inside the doorway for close to 20 years now.

Some of those keys might even fit locks we still have if we were to try and find them. I'm not fired up to find out though. I suspect me kids when clearing out the old barn hopefully way, way into the future, will wonder why the hell we kept them, and just toss them out. So it goes.

Understated Joe

Me Grandpa Joe could be, indeed he generally was, the kind of guy to go off on a dime. We expected it, quite frankly. He also had many uses for the world, 'hell', many of them actually rather profound in their employment. But at times he might actually be understated on both counts.

As a rule me Pops answered the phone for Joe's welder rental business. Joe only answered when Pops was out or otherwise occupied. One time he took a call (I don't know where Dad was) from an old but annoying customer, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, wanting to rent a welding machine. It seems though that on Cloyce's last rental there had been issues with whichever of Joe's units he had. Cloyce decided to use the opportunity of having the boss's ear to lament them.

He made the mistake of calling when things were very busy at the Shop. Still, Joe listened, holding his tongue surprising well. He waited until a break in Cloyce's litany of woe to say to him calmly, "Well, I'm so busy right now that I don't know if I even want more more work. So you can either stop whining and tell me when and where you want a machine, or keep talking until I tell you to go hell and hang up this phone."

Cloyce shut up about the troubles and got his welder. Maybe he was reading between the lines, or rightly caught the undercurrent of me Grandpa's intent.

Crowbar tales

Among the various tools we used when working on the old Hobart welders of me Grandpa Joe's were crowbars. We might use them to inch a heavy part into place or lift one momentarily out of the way to access another part. We might even use them to check gas levels in their tanks as few of our machines had gas gauges. But you get the idea: we used crowbars, at times for genuinely productive purposes.

A couple of days ago I spoke about Big Jim. He was a huge, mountain of a man, but also a helpful and nice guy who liked to joke around a bit. You can read about him here:

https://thesublimetotheridiculous.blogspot.com/2019/10/big-jim-and-heavy-cables.html

One day me Pops was out servicing a welder on a job that Big Jim was running. Dad finished the repair and went to let Jim know he was all set. He happened to have used his crowbar last, so he slung it across his shoulder as he made his way to the field office to speak to Jim.

He opened the door of the trailer and as it was winter closed it immediately to keep the heat in. Jim was sitting behind a desk looking over whatever, and he stopped when he saw Dad. Then a look of true terror spread across his face. Jim harshly pushed back from the desk and, holding his hands in front of his face and turning away, cried, "Hey, Bill, can't we just talk about this?"

Me Pops, temporarily forgetting he held a crowbar on his shoulder, puzzled about what Jim meant. Then he remembered the tool, and laughed along with Jim.

The fact is, me Pops would say later, he wouldn't go after Jim anyways. But if he were, it would be with something more substantial than a crowbar.