Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[Frank S]

When you are content be yourself don't compare or compete

[Toolmaker51]

In a blatant drive to pull traffic on this thread;
I just viewed the exchange between olderdan and thehomeengineer on the latter's "Poor mans CNC lathe cutting radius on manual lathe" and watched his video. Nice trick and posted a related comment. As usual video closed, offering six related videos. Hmm, OK let's see how these others work. Yeah, I know six related videos are foisted by hits, comments and clickbait, but this was worth it......No need to "Skip Ad" this time!

Commercials and I don't agree ordinarily. I can't think of any purchase initiated or influenced by one. Little I buy EVER had an ad, let alone a commercial. But some are memorable none the less, overshadowing the product or service. Too bad, low cost fun at some marketing-guy's expense.

[thehomeengineer]

Like it! might get one to cover my beloved Colchester lathe to protect it from any nasty spills that could happen in the workshop lol
The Home Engineer

[Frank S]

As long as you don't have to paint it purple

[Frank S]

She kind of looked like my little sister's first mother-in-law

[Frank S]

in 78 I was working at a company that built foundation drilling rigs. We were gearing up to come out with a new model. It was my job to fit up the frames with fixtures bolted in them to hold them true to dimensions then send them off to be welded out. The floor of the shop sloped 4 feet in 150 ft but right where my tabls was positioned it made dippy doodles uneven in all directions. the guy before me had it blocked up with what ever scrap he could find and it was forever getting jostled out of level. So 1 Saturday I conned the foreman into helping me get the table ready for the new frames that I had to first figure out how to get it dimensionally true then build the removable fixtures and make any adjustments to the layout design to get all of the parts to fit or cut them to fit and make notes on the prints.
I started out leveling the table by taking a fork lift and hauling it to the scrap pile. Jack asked me what I was doing so I told him I was going to make my table level. by shooting 4 1" thick 12by12 plates to the floor with 3/4" 5" long anchor bolts in each. then we used 2" all thread for the jack screws to level it then laid 14" 4 ft long
H beams across then 3 14" 12 ft long H beams lengthwise then we used a 6 ft by 14 ft sheet of 1 1/2" plate steel for the table top. wiht everything square and level I welded it all together.
Monday morning the big boss and 1 of the drafts men came down to my area to show me the latest revisions to the Prints.
The first thing out of the bosses mouth was who told you, you could change out your table
I just bowed up and said I did, You want to make these new frames and I have to make one perfect before the fixtures can be made and the piece of crap 1/2 plate table that was here was worthless. if you don't like it then bill me for it and when I leave here I will take it with me.
He busted out laughing then said I was wondering how long you were going to put up with the old table. The next day when I got to work I noticed that someone had , had the machinist bring the magnetic Bridgeport milling head and had milled the top flat from end to end side to side. Best fit up table I ever worked off of except for the 10 ton acorn platen table I worked off of at another plant

[PJs]

Good story Frank, and on a similar note to yours and what Tuomas was talking about....

In the late 90's I designed and built the 70' AMCA certified wind tunnel for the company at the time. It was powered by a 36kCFM fan and was 7' square with a man door into the main chamber for access to the air straighteners. The issue was the boss wanted to only build 2 sides and a top and let the weight of it rest on the floor for a seal. I designed the panels to be 10 gauge "C" channels as there would be times we would block off 3 of the 4 straighteners and run it full goose and to keep it from oil canning plus make it more modular in build and flexibility in length if need be. Once we got the fan mounted on its own isolation pad and the inlet plenum built I kept eyeballing the floor in this building. I had never liked the idea of this much pressure sitting on the floor and kept having this niggling feeling about this whole idea of floating this on the floor which I knew was not even close to straight in any direction. As I had 13 other balls in the air at the time I hadn't really gone through the all the calcs other than the weight "Should" be enough to keep it down plus I knew the door was going to be tricky to keep sealed on the high pressure side. Went back to the boss several times to argue the points about it but he was adamant about Get it Done as is. As he had fired 2 others prior to me for Not getting it Done, I decided to do an end run.

I only had 1 tech assistant on that project and got him to round up enough straight 2x4's, as straight as he could find, in shorter lengths ~8-10' so we could build a frame around the area where the wind tunnel would set. Then proceeded to lay out a grid of string over the top on about 6" square and measure the depths at every point and recorded them. I knew it was bad because of the huge gaps we had to truss up when we built the frame. Then dumped all the numbers into Excel and created a topo map that blew my mind. Plotted it out on D size paper, rolled it up and put it on the bosses desk when he wasn't there. A couple of hours later he came into my office with kind of a sheepish grin and said, well what are you going to do about it? I looked him in the eye and said, Well if you want me to do this and get it "Certified" (similar to getting a UL/CE, in price too), I would grind the floor as best I could then re-seal it and then seal the bottom with something like this (showed him what I had already worked out) and bolt it to the floor...and all this will take about this long. But I will no longer be rushed to fail and be fired like you did my 2 predecessors...Your Choice...Oh and I would like you to task the AE manager to finish specking out and designing the control system as my other 13 balls are wearing at me right now. Then I just sat there with my own sheepish grin waiting for him to make up his mind. As you all know I can be a bit prickly at times and was probably a bit then with some matter of fact thrown in for good measure...although it was his bus and I got that. There was a bit of fire in his eyes for about 4 seconds then, grinned big and laughed out loud and said, Well get on it.

The rest of that project went pretty smooth after that and had a big sigh of relief when the AMCA guy came to finish the certification and had real nice things to say to me about the design, particularly the SP sensors I designed for it, which he thought they might include some aspects of it in their future specs. On the fun side, the Tech I was working with was getting his sky diving certs and had been to one of those big fan, floating practice places and ask if I thought the WT had enough giddyup to do that. When we got to the far end of the build we blocked off ~2/3's of the end and he held onto the lip as I cranked the thing slowly up to full tilt, Testing of Course. Basically it would hold him off the ground a bit and could bounce to horizontal but not stay there...wish now I could have choked it down some more for him as he was a fine young man and a good tech...the grin on his face was worth the Grind...pun intended...messy business, grinding concrete in an enclosed area.

BTW the door worked smooth as glass and was built like a Power Wagon.

PJ

[Frank S]

PJs great story. It is often very frustrating when the very person who hired you or contracted you a lot of times in my case is often the one who becomes the biggest obstacle of a project when they themselves hired you for your expertise to circumvent any issues with a project before they happen. But it is really gratifying when a company you are with goes from being a minor subcontractor with limited scope of a large project to becoming the general contractor about half way through the construction because your company managers listened to you from the beginning. Insisting that everything your company did was above the set parameters for the project. While the General cut corners hired inexperienced or substandard quality labors then also padded his pockets with graft when buying below standard materials and paid graft to inspectors. throughout the construction of the building when the owner learned of this he canceled everyone's contract but ours. He even Fired the consulting firm I was a member Of the KES (Kuwait engineers society) but not A licensed PE so I scrambled contract a PE out of Germany With his expertise we brought the whole project in at budget even after the previous contractors legitimate bills had been paid

[Toolmaker51]

Continued.
Blatant effort to pull traffic toward this thread; with significant identification removed, still applies to more incidences than we'd care for.

Ms. Cxxxx
Last minute deal, but it 'sounds' [underlined, in italics, bold, highlighted and other interesting digital enhancements] as if Lxxx Xxxx will re-cancel & refund immediately. They couldn't offer justification how one policy was cancelled [by me], another enacted billing me for premiums, having jumped their ship for another carrier.
Mortgage company is aware of new Axxx Cxxxx policy effective 5-1-18 already, so that loop is closed.

Interesting that Lxxx Xxxx offer service, apologies and everything else; but no compensation for hour and 10 minutes off clock at work attending tasks most consumers expectation occurs at corporate end.

I'm still convinced surveys monitor what they can get away with, far more than 'improve customer service'.

[Frank S]

Insurance companies can be as fickle as a 12 year old's social media texts. their representatives usually independent agents are even more fickle, They try to make you believe you are their VBFF ( very best friends forever) but when they themselves play hide and seek by changing carriers mid stream, forcing you the consumer to spend your time doing their jobs you suddenly become an ex BFF until their bottom line suffers then will often try to offer you a lollipop if you will become their VBFF again