Another Great Pakistani youtube

[Joe Michaels]

This youtube is entitled "Craftsman are making the flour milling machine roller". It is an amazing study in how the Pakistani machinists, foundrymen, and forge shop blacksmiths work to produce flour mill rollers. The youtube begins with a neighborhood foundry. This foundry uses torpedo shaped melting furnaces, fired on waste engine oil. The torpedo furnaces turn slowly when firing. They are charged with scrap cast iron, much of which looks like products of other local foundries- stuff like curved spoke pulleys, smashed finned motor stators, busted pump housings, and any other cast iron scrap. The foundry uses centrifugal casting machines, driven by one-lung diesel engines. A flat belt spins the mold, and it is shifted and held in location by a bar driven into the ground to keep the mold spinning.

The hollow cast iron roller bodies arrive at the machine shop. This shop can only be described as the Pakistani equivalent of the shop where the "Bull of the Woods" worked. Old lathes are adapted to part off the ends of the cast roller bodies. A strap clamp around the rough casting trips a 'peck feed' mechanism to work the cross feed and run in a parting tool.

The shaft ends of the rollers are made in another local forge shop. Again, waste oil fired furnaces are used to heat the steel, which appears to be scrap from the ship breakers. The hammer smiths are quite good and have swage dies made up for this particular job.

The machinists bore the roller bodies using a shop-made line boring setup on another old lathe. Interestingly, the line boring bar is supported on a tapered roller bearing, the roller/cone being on an arbor in the tailstock, the female race or outer cone being in the end of the boring bar. The machinist uses a home-made telescoping gauge to get the inner diameters of the bored ends of the roller body. His telescoping gauge is two studbolts with rounded ends, a tapped bushing and a couple of hex nuts. He gets the bore diameters locked in on his home made telescoping gauge handily.

The shaft ends for the rollers are turned on another lathe, and the home made telescoping gauge and outside micrometer are used to turn the shaft ends for a shrink fit. The roller body is heated with open propane burners, with what look like oil drum lids used as heat/flame shields to keep the heat in the roller bodies. The machinist figured his shrink fit correctly as the shaft ends slide in, and soon are locked solid.

After the roller and shaft journals are turned to final diameters, a shop-made motorized milling head is mounted on a lathe topslide and used to mill a keyway in one shaft end. It looks like the Pakistanis use water dripping on the milling cutter as coolant. No guard or shroud on the milling head motor's cooling fan, and wiring looking like it could give someone a nasty shock, and water dripping for coolant. The milling head appears none too rigid in its setup, or the camera was shaking, but it does hog in a large keyway.

The really interesting finale comes with the machining of the grooves in the surface of the milling rollers. This shop has several specialized machine tools for this operation. These appear to be a light duty openside planer crossed with a rifling machine. As the roller is moved along the ways of the planer, it rotates a few degrees. This causes the toolbit to cut a groove on a very long spiral, almost a diagonal line. The machine tool for this job appears to have been specially built, and automatically indexes the roller for the next groove. No name was visible on these machine tools. The amount of 'spiral' appears to be adjustable, as is the indexing. When the rollers are finished, there are numerous fine 'rifled' grooves around the outside surface.

This shop has a mix of geared head engine lathes and cone drive lathes. Some of the cone drive lathe headstocks were modified to use roller chain drive for very low speed/heavy work like parting off the roller body casting ends. The carbide lathe tools look to be shop made with chunks of carbide brazed to steel bodies. In one sequence, a shop made carbide-tipped parting tool is used as a shim in a toolpost to hold another tool. As this particular lathe operation was being filmed, a chunk of the carbide tip on the parting tool/shim breaks off, but does not affect the operation and no one seems to notice. The shop has some overhead powered hoists, and rigging is done mainly with chains. It is a somewhat dark older shop, and while not having lineshafts, is a forest of older lathes and older machine tools. Instead of the Bull of the Woods walking the shop floor, there are a variety of older men, some who seem to be keeping a watchful eye on the work, some who do lend a hand to the younger machinists. The machinists use a surface gauge and pointer of sorts to center work in the lathe 4 jaw chucks, no dial indicators seen in use. However, they do use micrometers for the critical fits. They do not seem to own a combination center drill or 60 degree countersink. Rather, they simply poke a drilled hole in the end of the work and run the tailstock center into it. The shop is not what we'd consider a safe place to work, with many unguarded or open gears and unguarded belts and pulleys and similar. No one seems to wear safety glasses and many of the men work in sandals or light shoes. Despite this, whether in the foundry, the forge shop, or the machine shop, no one is wandering around with any bandages, eye patches or obvious missing parts. The men wear loose clothing typical of Pakistan, yet no one seems to have gotten wound up in the open gearing, nor does anyone get burned by molten iron, sparks or hot scale. The men in this youtube all seem happy to be working, and invariably, there are also men in these youtubes who are taking pictures or video on their phones aside from whomever is taking the actual youtube. While conditions there are not the safest and overall living conditions are a subject not for discussion here, it is heartening to see how local industry works. Scrap iron and old crankcase oil and scrap steel from the ship breakers and old machine tools and ingenuity and grit on the part of the Pakistanis all come together to meet the needs in their country.

In another youtube, a local shop is building what might be called 'wheat separators' or "threshing machines". These are PTO driven small threshing machines. The local shop builds them using plate brakes, shears, oxyacetylene cutting torches and stick welding. The Pakistanis have moved up from the locally built 'buzz box' welders to inverter power supplies. Seeing this, I was surprised they had not started using MIG welding as the building of the threshers required a lot of long seam welds on light sheet steel and light angle. They use stick welding, and despite having the inverter welding machines, do all their tack welding and some stitch welds without a shield. Aim the electrode for where they want to strike an arc, close their eyes and turn their head aside and burn rod for a second or two. When they do use a welding shield, it is a beatup piece of fiberboard with a welding filter lens, held in one hand. No one seems to wear gloves when welding or using a cutting torch, nor does anyone wear cutting goggles or similar. Feet in sandals, working cross legged while welding or burning with a torch seems the norm. Again, no one seems to be showing obvious past injuries, but I cringe when I see how these guys work. Anyone who has ever 'caught a flash' around welding knows what that feels like (sand under your eyelids later in the evening after you are done working). Anyone who has ever had a piece of weld slag pop into their eye and had to have the slag removed at the ER also knows how that feels. Been there a few too many times with both these injuries, so marvel at the Pakistanis and how they subject themselves to those conditions and keep on working. They produce equipment to meet their needs- threshers to harvest grain and mill rollers to mill it into flour to feed the population, using recycled machine tools and recycled materials and fueled on waste crankcase oil.

This youtube is unique in that it traces the making of the flour mill roller from the casting and forging to the complete machining.

 

[john.k]

Theres another good one where a forklift is driven over the red hot scale off a forging,and both front tyres catch fire .....doesnt worry the driver ,he just carries on like it happens a hundred times a day.

 

[Rob F.]

Thanks for that Joe.
Here is a link to the video, it is a little long and there is no talking so playing at double speed was fine for me.

 

[jmm03]

Thanks Joe. As always you post some interesting looks into what some might call lost technology. Your narratives are always very interesting also. I am sometimes amazed by the seemingly crude methods being able to achieve accurate results, the allthread inside mic, the crazy amount of backlash on the carriage, eyeballing the 4 jaw, but they get the work out don't they. I sometimes laugh when I read a post on the forum when someone says "I can't operate that old southbend, it's too worn out..." Their decendents will still be making stuff when some of ours are sitting around starving looking at dead cell phones. Jim

 

[guythatbrews]

I haven't watched the whole vid yet but thus far it's amazing what's being accomplished with so little.

Most of the guys look pretty young. I wonder how many will sport eye patches in their later years? They look dashing on some guys but I don't ever want one. Gosh it makes me squint just watching what they do with nary a pair of safety glasses among them all.

 

[Froneck]

I knew if I watched long enough some guys will be in sandals Makes my feet hurt just watching! A must video for the Global warning crowd! Love how they made alloy steel, Some of this little of that and few what evers!!

 

[Joe Michaels]

Jmm03:

Thanks for the kind words & I am glad you enjoyed the youtube. I "came up" at the tail end of lineshaft driven machine tools and got an incredibly good education at Brooklyn Technical HS (1964-68). We were using some of the original machine tools from 1924, and did have lineshaft driven machine shops as well as some WWII era geared-head machine tools. Our teachers came 'out of industry', and taught us how to work with worn machine tools to 'get the work out'. I worked in oldtime shops part time thru HS and engineering school, and having a lathe or mill with a generous amount of backlash in the feed screws was the norm, as was learning to work with worn machine tools. Grinding a twist drill freehand and grinding a HSS lathe tool freehand was a requirement. Our teachers also required us to setup work in 4 jaw lathe chucks, and would not let us use a dial indicator until we had gotten the work running true within 0.015" at max. I still play that game in my own shop, and often will bring round stock to within a couple of thousandths runout using the same sort of methods as the Pakistanis.

I worked overseas in SOuth America on engine and generator erecting jobs. These were small powerplants for local factories and mills. I worked with whomever was assigned to the job, often people who'd never seen or done that kind of work. We were lucky if we had a screw cutting engine lathe to cut threads on anchor bolts and to make parts and tools. Our first step was almost always to setup a blacksmith forge so we could make things like drifts, hot bend parts, or preheat iron castings that got smashed in shipment for welding. Rigging was done with ancient chainfalls- the kind you need to reeve a block and fall to hang from whatever you are picking loads off of. Or, rigging was done with cribbing (timbers stacked up like a log cabin) and jacks of one sort or another. I remember my first overseas job in Ecuador. I was on site to oversee erecting a Fairbanks Morse 38 D 8 1/8 diesel engine and generator on a concrete foundation in a small paper mill. The mill had a machine shop. The machine tools were older US made and had been bought used and shipped down there years previously. One screw cutting lathe which we wanted to use had had a crash and taken teeth off some of the gears on the quadrant. We built them up with brazing and I ground a form tool for the shaper. The shaper sounded worse than a concrete mixer full of boulders, but it worked to shape in the brazed repaired areas to rough-in the gear teeth. We 'ran in' the brazed teeth and they cold formed nicely. We cut screw threads for a lot of anchor bolts and turned bushings and other jobs on that lathe. I learned quickly enough to never let a piece of scrap metal get past me. To this day, I have an iron pile or two or three around our home place. I also keep a blacksmith shop on premises aside from my machine shop. I keep up my credentials as a Licensed Professional Engineer and as a Certifed Welding Inspector, so 'retirement' for me is merely a figure of speech. I get out and about into machine shops, a shipyard, and other work that has a way of finding me. In the shipyard, the workforce is a mixture of nationalities and languages. These immigrants are doing the heaviest, dirtiest work repairing barges and tugs. They are happy to have the work. Having worked in South America over 40 years ago, I have a little bit of Spanish that I learned on the jobs. I use it in the shipyard when I test some of the welders or inspect work, or just to kid around with them. These are people who do not back down from hard work and I enjoy working with them.

Recently enough, I was on a job where the contractor had a crew of stonemasons working. The boss was Mexican and had a crew of people from Uruguay, Central America, and Mexico. These guys had been together as a crew for about 15 years here in the USA. They were working hard and fast. I noticed no one wore safety glasses. One of the laborers was cutting bluestone with a gasoline masonry saw, running it dry. Clouds of stone dust enveloped the work area. No one wore respirators or even particle masks. I got hold of the boss, who had marginal English, and asked him in my busted-up Spanish why his men were not wearing safety glasses and masks. I managed to convey that stone dust was a real health hazard. His answer was a shrug and t he Spanish for "I bought glasses and masks, they don't want to use them." The crew found out I was a PE and were addressing me as either "Ingeniero" (engineer, used as a title of respect in South America, same way you'd call someone "Doctor"), or calling me 'Senor' (mister). They got jammed up with taking down a pipe fence, using a compact excavator. Fence was welded construction. I could see the problem, so told them to hold up, and that I had a 'tool to cut pipe'. I got a Ridgid pipe cutter and went at it. Some of the men came over and said in Spanish they'd take over, calling me 'Ingeniero". I made a point of telling them my name and telling them I was 'un otro Hombre' (another one of the guys). They thanked me profusely for helping, and we kidded around whenever I was on the job with them. At lunch time, these guys took exactly 30 minutes. One guy's wife would bring a load of food and they had a few small microwave ovens and a portable generator. They ate well and 30 minutes later were hitting it hard. No complaints, no dragging ass as I've seen plenty of people do. It reminded me of South America, where workers were poorly treated by mill owners. When I saw that on those jobs, I made a point of setting up to feed and look after my crews when I worked on those jobs. Make a grill out of an oil barrel cut in two, get some locally made lump charcoal and have the men hire a cook, and I'd give the cook money to buy food. This crew of stonemasons was a throwback to those days, having a 'cook' on the job and eating communally.

I've lived and worked in conditions not too far removed from what the Pakistani youtubes show. It changes a person's thinking and the way they deal with other people. I tell people that my time overseas was a great post-graduate school. It could be summed up in the phrase: "You gotta play the hand you're dealt". Come on a job in some backwater place from the USA and you can do two things: bitch about what you'd have and how the job would be done in the USA; or, fall in with the local people and work with them and get the job done with what was at hand. If you were dumb enough to bitch about how you'd do the job in the USA, you got nothing done and alienated everyone and likely packed up and went home in short order. Seen a number of American engineers and technical people do just that. I fell in with the locals and had a great experience. Hard work, but a real crucible and better than any post-graduate school. This is why I relate to and enjoy the Pakistani youtubes.

Here in the USA, I have seen so-called welders bitch if they did not have an auto-darkening welding shield with wild designs of skulls or flames on it. I have seen these same guys complaining that they could not get the heat set right to weld, and this was with state of the art inverter welders with digital controls. Similarly, I've seen all too many of the newer generation of machinists who can't work unless the machine tools have Digital Readout (DRO) and can't grind their own tools, totally dependent on indexable carbide tooling. If those guys had to grind a form tool, or work on an old lathe or mill with plenty of wear and backlash, they'd be sunk. The Pakistanis are real machinists. I 'came up' under German immigrant machinists who'd come to the US in 1923 or thereabouts. Worn machine tools, using files and deburring with a 3-corner scraper (no fancy deburring tools with cushy handles), doing shop math longhand on a yellow pad (no pocket scientific calculators), grinding our own tools, knowing how to live with flat belt driven machine tools... much of this is almost lost to time in the USA. I get into state of the art machine shops with CNC machining centers. My nephew is in his third year at a modern machine shop, he's sharp with scheduling and estimating so he is in the position of scheduler/floor boss, but at the same time is apprenticing as a CNC machinist. I see the jobs that shop does and marvel at what CNC machine tools can produce. My nephew was running a job made of Invar in a CNC lathe, then into a CNC milling center. Totally off-the-wall geometry and incredibly tight tolerances. I've seen the world progress, remembering the first "NC" machine tools (numerically controlled), which used a paper tape with perforations. My nephew does get his share of manual machine work on Hardinge HLV lathes, Moore jig bores, and Bridgeports as well as Blanchard grinders. The shop keeps one ancient heavy Cincinnati horizontal mill for hogging out certain jobs. My nephew lovers setting up and running jobs on it, and tells me it's a 'real machine tool' with a different feeling than the modern CNC machine tools. It's quite a special feeling for me to walk onto that shop floor and have my nephew come over and hug me and be welcomed by the rest of that shop. Not too many of us left actively working who 'came up' with flat belt driven machine tools. I do not know if it is even possible to 'work around' wear in a CNC machining center as we would on an old worn mill or lathe. I know that to be competitive, many shops are continually upgrading their CNC machine tools. Maybe the CNC stuff is obsolete before it wears out. Meanwhile, in places like Pakistan, ancient and worn manual machine tools and working with what's at hand are how the people keep their countries going. No software issues, no problems with downloading CAD files, just drag the work into the shop and hoist it up onto the machine tools and get to work. Gotta love it.

 

[TomBoctou]

... The shop is not what we'd consider a safe place to work, with many unguarded or open gears and unguarded belts and pulleys and similar. No one seems to wear safety glasses and many of the men work in sandals or light shoes. Despite this, whether in the foundry, the forge shop, or the machine shop, no one is wandering around with any bandages, eye patches or obvious missing parts. ...

It's pretty safe to assume that anyone who gets injured is fired.

 

[ramsay1]

I knew if I watched long enough some guys will be in sandals Makes my feet hurt just watching! A must video for the Global warning crowd! Love how they made alloy steel, Some of this little of that and few what evers!!

It's pretty safe to assume that anyone who gets injured is fired.

 

[ramsay1]

We could always send them osha.. Cheers Ramsay 1

 

[99Panhard]

I work every day with machines as old or older than those we see in the videos. I admit I'm not fast but it's work that can be done and when you are making one-off parts...and sometimes modifying them as you go, I don't think the old machines are a serious drawback.

Regarding injuries...some time ago I was doing some research in the National Archives reading records of the the Springfield Armory in the 1870s. At the time it was probably the most advanced manufacturing plant in the country but we can assume that none of the "safety" features common today were present. The men were paid piece rates so it was in their interest to be fast. Every on-the-job injury was recorded and the subject of an inquiry. Something like 90% of the injuries were due to the workman being drunk.

It was also one of the few places where, if you worked 30 years, you could collect a pension when you retired. The officers who ran the place went out of their way not to fire long term injured workers...even if they had been drunk. One I remember particularly well was a man that had lost a finger...but was described as "up to now a steady hand". Rather than fire him, they reassigned him as a night watchman so that he could retire and collect his pension.

These Pakistanis are all Moslems. If at all religious (and I suspect most are) they don't drink.

 

[Joe Michaels]

99Panhard:

Drinking of alcoholic beverages in the workplaces years ago was the norm. When I entered Brooklyn Technical HS in 1964, we had an older gent as a teacher of wood patternmaking. He had worked as a patternmaker in shops around Brooklyn, NY and was a WWI veteran. He told us the following story:

Back when he was an apprentice boy in a pattern shop, every man on the clock (the time clock or being on the payroll) was given a 1 gallon beer pail. Their timeclock number was punched into the pail and its lid. There were two wood poles with a series of nails driven in pairs, and a load of heavy wire hooks. The apprentice boys would walk single file, with poles supported on their shoulders between them. The beer pails would be hung on the wire hooks off the poles and the apprentice boys would walk a block or two to the local tavern. The shop had an account there, and the bartender would fill each pail with a gallon of lager beer. Lids went on the pails and the boys walked back to the shop with a load of filled beer pails. They'd walk thru the shop and each man would take off his pail and have his beer ration for the day.

The pattern shop where this teacher was an apprentice had a machine shop. They sent patterns out to have iron castings poured from them. During machining, the machinists were finding large blowholes in the castings. The machine shop foreman & the pattern shop foreman complained to the foundry. The foundry made good by pouring another run of them at no additional cost, but did not reimburse for lost time shop time. After a few repeats of this, the pattern shop foreman decided to to find out what was causing the blowholes. The apprentice was sent to the foundry. He was told to watch the molders like a hawk .

As he told the story, the molders all got their gallon pails of beer in the morning. As the day wore on, the molders had to relieve themselves. Our teacher said he noticed a number of the molders were "pissing in the sea coal pile". Sea Coal was soft coal which was run thru a ball mill to produce a powdered coal. This was was used to face the sand molds The molten cast iron was hot enough to melt the sand & would form a very hard skin on the castings. The powdered soft coal would instantly gas-off when the molten iron hit it, forming a thin layer of gas just long enough to prevent the sand from vitrifying, the gas being dissipated thru the venting in the molding sand. That the pile of sea coal was run thru the ball & used to face the molds. The apprentice boy (our teacher) played dumb & asked the molder foreman if the molders "pissing in the coal pile was gonna f--k up the castings". The molder foreman said no problems would arise from anyone pissing in the coal pile. The apprentice boy then asked if he could take a simple flatback pattern, ram up a mold & face it with something other than that powdered coal. The molder foreman figured to humor the apprentice boy and handed him a small flatback wood pattern. The apprentice boy rammed up a mold, & the foreman faced it with graphite. That afternoon, they poured a run of castings, including the mold rammed by the apprentice boy.

The next day, the pattern shop and machine shop foremen were up at that foundry, asking that the apprentice boy's casting be smashed to bits as well as some castings from the previous day's regular run (faced with the pissed-on powdered coal). The apprentice boy's casting was sound, no porosities or blowholes. The castings from the regular run had blowholes.

Our teacher told us that it was standard practice for the oldtime machine shops, pattern shops and foundries in Brooklyn (and elsewhere as shown in a Bull of the woods cartoon with apprentice boys and beer pails) to provide buckets of beer to the men 'on the clock'.



I was about 15 when I first started working for German immigrant machinists in an oldtime machine shop. This was a summer job and part time during the school year. The foreman and journeymen spoke German in the shop. I knew some Yiddish, which is a kind of German dialect, so had found my way into that shop and was able to understand and converse to some degree with the men. The foreman would ring a gong like you'd find in a boxing ring or ship's engine room to signal when work (and the line shafting) was to start or stop. He'd also blow a steam whistle on shop air to signal day's end and break times. The first morning I worked there, I had not had breakfast. The catering truck (aka "Roach Coach) arrived, and the shop steward and some of the journeymen made sure I got a cup of coffee and a buttered hard roll. It tided me over until lunch. During the afternoon, the foreman blew the air whistle. The shop steward and the journeyman I was working with took me to a corner of the shop. The foreman was handing out brown-glass quart bottles of lager beer. He handed me one, and said I was a man on the clock, so got my beer same as the rest of the men. I remember he told I was "Lehrling, nummer Drei und Zwanzig, (Apprentice, number 23- this being my timeclock number) They told me this was how it was done in Germany. I had a quart of beer each afternoon I worked in that machine shop. No one got injured, no one got out of line.

At age 20, as an undergraduate engineering student, I worked one summer in the old Rheingold Brewery. Engineering students hired for the summer had to join the Brewery Workers Union Local 6. The Union office was over a German bar. We went to the union hall and all fees were waived, and we paid token dues. The union business agent spoke good English and asked us about ourselves and said he hoped that, as young engineers, we'd make a career in the breweries and keep them going. He told us there were 50 breweries operating in Brooklyn when we were born (1950), and by 1970, it was down to maybe 3. These were real regional breweries, not artisan microbreweries. The BA told us quite a bit about the brewing industry and traditions, and then switched gears by asking: "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" (do you speak German). We all replied "Ja", and he continued in German by saying he had one more question to ask of us. He asked in German if we liked beer. Of course, we replied "Ja, Naturlich !" ( Yes, Naturally !"). He shook our hands and wished us all good luck and thanked us for coming to work in the brewery. On the job, we were told we could have all the beer we cared to drink at any time of the workday with a few conditions: we must not drink so it affected us or our work; we could not take any beer off premises (barring that contained in our bladders). With that we started our work in the brewery. We were each given a hardhat and a "cellar jacket". This jacket was a denim jacket with wool blanket lining and the brewery name on an embroidered patch. It was to be worn if we had to work in the lager or fermenting cellars, the kegging line, or other refrigerated areas. I soon made friends with the coppersmiths and pipefitters. They made me a "cellar mug". This was a piece of schedule 10 (thinwall) 3" stainless pipe with a disc welded to the bottom end, and belt clip welded to it. My initial was on it German gothic lettering, done in TIG welding. If I worked in the cellars, I could draw about a quart of beer from one of the lagering tanks at a sampling petcock. Beer so cold it chilled your teeth, with a head you could seemingly float a half dollar on. We started drinking beer at 0730 standing in line to clock in. If the work started at 0800, this did not mean you clocked in at 0800 or were in the locker room, it meant at 0800 you were where your work was and going at it. Everyone drank beer thru the days. No one ever seemed to get drunk or affected in any way by it. I think it was a cultural thing and people drank moderately, not slamming down beers, but nursing it.

I've learned that by 1980, the insurance companies cracked down on the surviving regional breweries (the brewery I worked in was closed by 1974 despite a lot of capital improvements). By 1980, the breweries adopted and across the board rule that there would be no drinking of the beer on the job. I learned this during a tour of Matt's Brewery in Utica, NY and also at a tour of the Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, PA. End of an era.

 

[99Panhard]

I certainly know it was commonplace. Years ago my dad gave me an 1898 book titled "How to Run a Printing Office" (we were in the printing business)...and one of the comments made by the author was that it was necessary to keep a good supply of beer in the shop for the printers. If you've ever seen a hand-fed Chandler & Price printing press you'll understand why even a slight buzz could easily cost you a finger or two or even a hand. I was running one when I was 13. We didn't have beer in the shop and I'm certain it would not have been allowed. As far as the accidents I was referring to, I'm pretty sure those armory workmen were dead drunk..."in liquor" was the term the investigating officers used.

In 1915 Britain adopted a new licensing law that drastically reduced the times of the day liquor could be sold. This was, at least partly, a result of a rash of industrial accidents in war production factories and was intended to make it impossible for the workers to drink too much at lunch time. If I remember correctly, pubs weren't allowed to sell beer until 3PM...something I discovered the first time I went to the UK. That regulation was only rescinded fairly recently and I suspect one of our UK members will probably remember the details much better than I do.

 

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

If they were drinking beer that’s anything like the US Budweiser they were more in danger of drowning than getting drunk. Now the Czech Budweiser - that’s another story.

Some great stories there Joe.

I worked with some guys from the USA years ago ( Albany International ) and the first thing they wanted to know was where was the nearest pub and was the English beer any good ? The guy who was leading the project spent lots of time in ” The Merry Monk “ and he loved the “ Marston’s Pedigree “ bitter.

Most guys had a lunch time drink back then and a drink right after work some of the time.
I got into the habit of going for a pint after working overtime with 3 of the other guys from our department. This went on for a few weeks until one night. We were all sat around the table, I had my back to the door, my pal was facing the door. We were laughing and joking when all of a sudden it went very quiet. My mate‘s wife had walked in through the door carrying his evening meal on a plate. She plonked it down on the table without a word. She just turned around and left, followed shortly by my pal ! After that the drinking club broke up. I feel deeply ashamed now because I had a wife and child at home at the time and I should have been spending more time with them.

When I was young and really foolish I had the job of removing a large press brake at one place I worked. It was being sent back to the makers for an overhaul. The machine was really well grouted in so we got a team of guys in with jack hammers to break up the foundation. They started at 5-00 pm when the day shift went home. They were creating big clouds of dust and it was a red hot evening so my pal said to the works manager “ Is it ok if we go for a pint Cyril ? This lot will be an hour or two before they’ve finished “.
He said “ OK, but don’t have too many ! “
So four pints Of “ Stella Artois “ lager each later we got back to the job. We jacked the press brake up, got it onto skates, and began winching it towards the loading bay. A low loader and mobile crane were coming to pick it up in the morning.
When we were almost in the loading bay we realised the machine wouldn’t go through the door into the bay, it was too tall. The problem was the big electric motor on top of the machine. Remove that and we were good to go. So I said to one of our labourers “ Go and get an 1/2 Ton chain block Fred, we’ll need to get that motor down “. Fred says “ Can’t we do it with a rope Tyrone ? “
Fred was the strongest man I ever worked with. He was built like Charles Atlas. He was the anchor man in a team of stunt divers that toured local holiday resorts at the weekend. For their party piece Fred stood on the high board with two guys on his shoulders. They had three guys stood on their shoulders. Then Fred jumped the lot off the board.
So I said “ OK Fred, go and get a rope.“ Not thinking that it was weight that matters in this equation, not strength.
Anyway Fred comes back with the rope, I climb up the ladder to the top of the machine and slipped the rope over an adjacent steam pipe and tied it off in the eye bolt on top of the electric motor. It was sat on runners so I un bolted it and got ready. Fred tied the rope around his waist a dozen times and braced himself. Then I shoved the motor off the runners ! The motor went down and Fred came up - all in an instant. How they missed each other I’ll never know ! Unfortunately the motor tipped on the way down and smashed down pulley and shaft end first. Wrecking the motor. We got Fred down with the ladder !
After that I never drank if I was working on a job afterwards.

Regards Tyrone.

 

[Joe Michaels]

Great story as well, Tyrone.

In my early years (1972-78) as a young engineer on powerplant construction project sites, heavy drinking was the norm. Having a "boilermaker" (a shot of whisky chased with a beer) was a fairly standard thing if the men ate lunch in nearby taverns. On one job, I was assigned to follow the boiler erecting contract. The steam drums were over 100 feet above ground level. Lunch times , if I was up near the steam drums, I hitched a ride down on either the 'headache ball' (the overhaul ball used to keep a crane's hoisting rope pulled straight), or in a 'scale box' if more than 2 of us had to come down for lunch. The operator of a big crane would swing the whip line with either the headache ball of the scale box for us to ride 'express elevator' down. Sometimes he landed us on a stake rack or pickup truck bed. IThe driver would take off fast as we only had 1/2 hour for lunch. The destination was "The North End Saloon". No tables or chairs had 4 of the same legs, as the furniture got busted up regularly in bar fights. The toilets in the mens room were anchored to the floor by heavy steel flat bar & lag screws as drunks tended to uproot the toilets.

In the North End Saloon and there were tables with electric griddles. There was bratwurst, kielbasa (Polish sausage), fried onions, and there was chopped raw onion, hot sauerkraut. You hollered out your choice , they slapped it into a roll, handed it to you. The next table had hefty shot glasses filled to the brims with rye whisky, and brown glass quarts of Stroh's "Fire Brewed Bohemian Beer". You had the plate with your sausage sandwiches in one hand, with your other, you banged own a shot of whisky. You grabbed a quart of beer and found a place to sit and finish your lunch.

As you left, the bartender hollered to ask you what you had. If you said "the usual", the bartender hollered back: "A bump (shot of whisky), a beer,& a horsecock sandwich..." I do not recall the cost of this epicurean delight, but it was likely under 3 bucks.

You ran out the door of the North End Saloon and jumped aboard the truck, back to the jobsite and often, back into the scale box and up to the steam drum elevation.

We lost no one as a result of drunkenness on that job. I did see my first man get killed in front of me on that job due to a lack of fall protection equipment, this being pre-OSHA days. I was walking into the boilerhouse, which had no siding on it, and had a temporary railroad spur laid into it. I was passing a flatcar piled with boiler skin panels ( steel plate with channel steel stiffeners) when there was a hellacious crash, even above the din from crafts working all over the boiler house. I looked atop the pile of skin plates and recall my mind seemed to be reacting and processing slowly, realizing I was seeing a body laying there, a guy on his back in Carhartt winter coveralls, head at an unnatural angle, face going blue. Everyone else was so busy or not in the immediate area that it seemed I was the first guy to notice. I ran and reported the accident. Some of the men began CPR, and the fellow was taken away by ambulance and pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He was a 19 year old boilermaker apprentice, working up at the top of the boiler house with his father and uncle. Boiler skin panels were being hoisted off the flatcar using an air tugger winch mounted up near the steam drum elevation. A block (pulley) was made on to a high steel beam and the line from the tugger went thru a hoistway created by removing floor grating panels, all the way to ground level. The young fellow was assigned to grab onto the skin panels as they came up thru the hole in the floor grating and pull them onto the floor grating as the tugger operator let down on the hoist line. The jobsite was a stone's throw from the shore of Lake Superior, and the work location was high enough to be above the coal pile. The wind off Lake Superior was strong, and it spun the skin panel this fellow was holding onto before he knew what hit him. He was spun back out over the opening in the floor grating, lost his grip and fell to his death. I was a newly minted Professional Engineer, had responsibilty for overseeing Riley Stoker's contract and work, so was assigned to go up on the 'iron', and make a sketch of the accident scene for the coroner. That apprentice was sober, and left a wife and infant. Drunkenness was not a factor, just the times and work practices. People who bitch about work safety rules have never seen an accident like that one. It changed me for life. I realized that I could well wind up like that apprentice, and made it a point to change a lot of my ways, trying to end each day in a good way so that if I were not there the next morning, people would speak well of me rather than the person I had been up un til then.

My own finale for 'stopping after work' happened in 1982. I was a construction superintendent, employed by the NY Power Authority, on a small hydroelectric power project, and had been married under a year. We lived in an apartment some 40=45 miles from the jobsite, and I had a 1982 Ford Bronco with NY Official license plates on it as a take-home vehicle. The Bronco had the old style 4-speed manual transmission with granny gear. One fine day, we rolled the first of the three hydro turbines and made first power with it. Brown Boveri was the general contractor and had a mix of German and Swiss engineers on the job. Across the street from the hydro plant was an old Austrian bar/restaurant. We all walked off site to that bar. The BBC guys put a credit card on the bar and platters of bratwurst and mugs of draft German beer came non-stop.

It was about 3:00 PM when this fest started. Rules were so much different (or nonexistant) back then and a construction super could accept a meal or beers from the contractors. Now, it is conflict of interest and strictly forbidden. At that occasion, the millwrights, the BBC guys, the erecting shop contractor's site people and yours truly were having a fine old time of it. It was pre cell-phone days, so I had to use the bar's pay phone to call my wife to say I was running late. Wife knew the score and said she'd come down the 45 miles to drive me home, too much at stake. I was bull headed and said I had worked in a brewery and had been drinking with ironworkers, pipefitters and boilermakers for years and could handle my beer. We continued the revelry and about 8 PM, I climbed into the Bronco for the run home, heading North on the Taconic State Parkway- a very old parkway noted for its curves and narrow lanes. I put the Bronco in third gear, knowing it would slow me down if I eased up on the throttle, and got on the Taconic, talking to myself: "sight the centerline of the hood... now offset it from the lane marker line and the fog line... hold her steady as she goes..." In this manner, I was making headway up the Taconic. I came to a wide and straight area with the two directions separated by a grass median. All of a sudden, there was a sea of emergency vehicles all over the median, in my lane and in the oncoming lanes. I ground to a stop. I took a look and saw a single engine low wing aircraft sitting in the oncoming lanes. My mind snapped and I immediately thought I was drunker than I actually was, and had missed some turns and gotten onto Westchester County Airport. All I could think of was I'd be facing federal charges for crashing into an airport, would be fired from my job, and my professional license pulled, life as I knew it would be over.

Then, I looked out the portside window of the Bronco and realized I was not seeing taxi-way lights (blue) or runway marker lights (white). Still scared, I inched the Bronco ahead in granny gear. A guy with wand flashlight waved me to stop. I had the window down and my head turned so he hopefully would not smell the beer on me. He hollered out: "Some sonofabitch made a forced landing, there's Foamite and fire hoses all over the place, watch it, buddy." I said I would and inched the Bronco thru that area. If it is possible to sober up in an instant, it seemed to happen for me. I made it home to my wife without incident, thanking God for being with me. I came in the door expecting my wife to give me hell. Instead, she asked what went on, knowing already in our marriage that the construction crowd were hard drinkers. I told her the whole story and said I was never again going to get sucked in to stopping after work. Wife and I have been married over 40 years, I had a great 32 years with the NY Power Authority and retired 10 years ago from their employ. Never did stop after work and get into that condition again.

As some readers know, I was diagnosed with cancer (GIST or gastro intestinal sarcoma tumor) about 2 1/2 years ago. I underwent surgery and have been on a targeted immune cell therapy drug on a daily basis ever since. I asked the doctors if I could drink alcoholic beverages given my history and the drug I am on. They answered I could "have one now and then". I decided I'd never touch alcohol again. Not worth it. I'd seen what it did to a number of men I met along the way, aside from valuing my own life and realizing how sweet and good life is, and how much there is to live for. Now, there are 'fitness for duty' policies in most workplaces, and having the 'hydraulic lunch" (alcoholic beverages) is frowned upon and might get a guy referred to "substance abuse" programs or fired. It's a change for the better.

 

[PDW]

Early in my career when I was a fisheries biologist the first thing that'd happen when we got back to port was off to the pub with the crew.

After a few sessions and watching the bar fights as the evening wore on - waterside pubs were never great - I developed my survival strategy. Always buy the first round, hang about until round 3 then leave a beer half finished and go to the gents.

And head out the door back to the ship.

You'd been social, you'd bought your round and all would be good with the crew. But you'd keep your teeth and not wake up with a hangover.

I got to spend a lot of time on watch driving the ship on the way out of port after a 3 day resupply visit while the others dealt with their hangovers...

PDW

 

[Froneck]

I don't think they have many injuries due to drinking! Walking around the shop in sandals and some without socks with chips all over not to mention melted steel muct contribute to a lot of foot injuries not to mention the lack of safety shoes. A few were walking around in loose robe like clothing that can drag them into machinery. Yeah probably if they get hurt their pay is docked the expense of cleaning all the blood!

 

[Joe Michaels]

Froneck:

At the risk of treading into a sensitive subject: I believe the Pakistanis are Muslims. Hence, no drinking. I've noted the loose clothing and the sandals, wondering how these guys survive without visible injuries. In many Pakistani youtubes, the mechanics work barefoot, squatting or cross-legged seated. In many of these youtubes, these mechanics use their bare feet as additional 'hands' to hold or brace what they are working on.

The foundries are the wildest of all. No one seems to have safety glasses, nor do they wear much in the way of protective clothing. Molders always seem to ram up sand molds by stomping with their bare feet. Iron or steel is melted and poured by Pakistanis who rarely wear eye protection, maybe a pair of plastic sunglasses, and gloves or safety shoes or flame resistant/ heat reflective clothing is non existant in those foundries.

Some few years back, when Bloomberg was mayor of NY City, he made a point of stating that NY City would not buy manhole covers or catch basin castings and similar from "any vendor that pollutes the air". The result was the newer manhole covers and storm drains (or catch basins) in the NYC streets have the same appearance as the older ones, with one addition: "Made in India". I watched a youtube which "The New York Times" posted, taken in the foundry in India where the NYC manhole covers and storm drain castings were being poured. Same situation as the Pakistani foundries. Molder working in minimal clothing, ramming molds using their bare feet. Iron was being melted in a cupola furnace fired on coke. Under the US Clean Air Act, cupola furnaces without emissions controls became illegal. Many of the old-line US iron foundries and firms that poured their own iron castings with cupola furnaces went out of business. The result was a lot of iron and semi steel castings that were poured in US foundries for US products wound up being cast offshore. The iron foundry pouring the NY City manhole covers and storm drain parts was using a cupola furnace fired on coke, no stack emissions controls. The molders, as per their religious custom, all wore a red string around one of their biceps. Maybe this was all the protection they needed to work in that foundry. The foundry had some beat-up ancient Yale forklifts which pissed oil out of cylinder packings and left a trail of oil. The finished castings had "NYC Sewer", "NYC Water" and similar cast into them, same as the original ones. The castings were slicked up with black paint and banded for shipment to NY City.

People who think that the clean air act and the closure of US foundries was the answer to air pollution have their heads in the sand (which would be right when discussing foundries), or maybe their heads are somewheres else. The Indian and Pakistani foundries produce castings, some of which wind up on the streets of NY City. The castings arrive via ocean freight. The pollution from the cupolas arrives via jetstream air freight, free of charge.

In some youtubes of Pakistani foundries, the scrap iron and limestone and coke are charged into the cupolas by laborers. These laborers place a beat-up steel basin on top of their head filled with whatever is to be charged into the cupola. Up a rickety ladder or perhaps a concrete stair with no handrail they go, and dump the charge into the cupola. In the Pakistani forge shops, the furnaces for heating the steel are fired on waste crankcase oil. The burners are what might be called a 'drool burner'. Waste crankcase oil is stored in a barrel or tank on a high stand, and drains by gravity to the burner. Sometimes, a wood fire is lit under the waste oil storage tank to thin it out and help it make it thru the burner. The burner is nothing more than what looks like a needle valve, used to throttle the flow of oil. The oil drools out a pipe which is centered in the forced draft pipe. A paddle type pressure blower and a cobbed together connection supply combustion air and forced draft. No evidence of any kind of swirl baffles to cause the combustion air to better mix with the oil. Lighting these burners is usually done by using either a small wood fire, or some oily rags. Anyone who has ever been around burning waste crankcase oil, such as when quenching hot steel parts to harden or blacken them, knows the fumes from burning waste crankcase oil are BAD. In the forge shops and some of the foundries, the Pakistanis are in the midst of thick smoke from waste crankcase oil burning way rich. This smoke continues until the inside of the furnace gets hot enough to help the combustion processes. In the Pakistani forge shops, when they are doing heavy forging, they wrap their faces and heads in anything handy and wear sunglasses when hooking red or orange hot heavy chunks of steel out of the furnaces. They also make movable heat shields out of burlap sacking stretched on light frames. The burlap is kept wet, and steam can be seen coming off it as they move these shields to block the radiant heat coming out of the furnaces.

These guys live on what we'd consider to be minimal or insufficient amounts/types of foods, work in what we'd consider to be very unsafe conditions, and keep on going, getting the jobs done. These guys barely get what we'd consider a square meal, live in conditions that make our slums seem good, and do repairs to heavy trucks and heavy equipment we'd never allow (or be crazy enough) to run on the public roads. As I've said, I have a great respect for the people in these youtubes. They find ways to make things work and literally 'make something out of nothing'. The great piles of swarf (chips or turnings) in the Pakistani machine shops do not wind up dumped somewhere. Instead, those piles of swarf are taken a short distance to the nearest iron or steel foundry and charged into the furnaces. An auto or truck storage battery that we would turn in for core exchange gets rebuilt in a hole-in-the-wall type shop. When a storage battery is beyond all rebuilding, the battery case gets used as a tub for water or to drain oil into. Nothing goes to waste in places like Pakistan. They did not need a formalized recycling program, nor is the notion of recycling a new concept to them. They've been doing it of necessity all along.

 

[jim rozen]

At one time having any drinking alcohol at my workplace was a firing offence. The story was that Watson Sr. sold sewing machines at one time, and he made a big sale, parked his horse and wagon outside a bar and had a few drinks. While in the bar the wagon and his samples were stolen. Hence the no booze rule. Nowadays they have social events on site where they serve wine and beer. Because I ride a motorbike home, I don't bother with that. The other watson sr. story was he made sure that payday was on a thursday so the wife of the house could get ahold of some of the pay, before the worker drank it all up on the friday.

I worked in an electronics shop when I was in college, and the everyone would go to a local bar for lunch as a rule. The boss had a beer with his lunch every day, but on fridays he would drink an entire pitcher by himself - and was not much good for the rest of the day, he would just sit at his desk in the shop. As a young kid (not much of a drinker) this really amazed me. Another co-worker of mine in that shop mentioned that mike basically just sat there and farted all afternoon, but as the gas was mostly carbon dioxide from the beer, they didn't smell at all.

Interesting the man that made that comment was the person who first taught me to ride a motorbike.

 

[jmm03]

Just before I went into the service in 73 I worked a graveyard shift at a RCA record pressing facility. When we got off at 0700 we would hit the local watering hole for some pitchers. The owner must have figured we were some dyed in the wool alchy's to start that early...