Moving out the Boxcar Machine Shop, Approximate date of Brown & Sharpe magnetic chuck

[Joe Michaels]

Moving out the Boxcar Machine Shop, Approximate date of Brown & Sharpe magnetic chuck

We were moving several old machine tools out of the boxcar shop last week. These went to the shop of the Hanford Mills manager. The boxcar shop had not been used in at least 15 years, and had become a repository for all sorts of stuff that no one seemed to know about. I found a wooden box with a toolmaker-made sine bar and some hardened and ground special tooling. I was hunkered down on my hands and knees to get the steady rest and 3 jaw chuck for a 16" Reed & Prentice geared head engine lathe when I spotted another small wooden packing crate. I dragged it out into the daylight and was surprised at how heavy the crate was for its size. I was also surprised to see the crate was made of rough-sawn lumber, nailed together with hand-driven nails, and had the stencilling on it: "From B & S, Providence, R.I." In addition, the B & S old style logo with the "solid head" square was stencilled onto the crate. The lid had been taken loose, so I was able to see what was inside the crate.

Inside the crate is a factory-new B & S permanent magnet chuck, about 6" x 10". It is covered in preservative and has some kind of waxed paper over the working surface of the chuck. It looks like it was never out of the crate or mounted/used. The construction of the crate, being made with rough sawn lumber that has darkened with age, and the hand-driven nails (as opposed to air driven), and the stencilled old style B & S logo really caught my eye. I know Brown & Sharpe pretty much wound up its operations as far as building precision grinders and presumably the chucks for them in the 1980's. This crate looks even older. I know even by the 1960's, B & S had moved to a newer plant in Kingstown, Rhode Island. No other data is stencilled on the crate, and the lid which would have had a shipping label, is not original to the crate. It is a piece of painted plywood cut to fit the crate, no nail holes in it.

Can anyone give a rough idea of how old the magnetic chuck and its crate are ? No one knows how it came to be in the boxcar machine shop. We did get a donation of a Covel surface grinder, which will find its way to my shop.

As for the boxcar shop and the Catskill Mountain Railroad: The politicians and tree huggers have prevailed to a large extent and 11 miles of Catskill Mountain Railroad track have been torn up for a rail trail. It was time to move out the machine tools from the boxcar shop before the whole works was scrapped by the County, who is slavering and champing at the bit to do just that. My buddy Earl has an ancient Austin-Western hydraulic crane with an I-H 6 cylinder gas engine in it. Earl showed up to run his crane. Of course, it would not start. It was like rolling our clocks back over 30 years to when Earl and I used to get junk running to work on the railroad when we had no budget. We lifted the distributor cap and snapped the points, decided the points were burnt and filed them. I told Earl he is not keeping up with the times, since new points generally do not have enough plating on the contact surfaces to allow any dressing. We got the points on high distributor cam lobe with me watching the cam and hollering to Earl who was jumping the starter solenoid with pliers handles. We regapped the points and still no fire. The rotor looked pretty well arc pitted, so we tried filing and emery cloth. Still no fire. Earl went to the old NAPA store where the parts men know our equipment and know about things like ignition points and caps and rotors. I got busy with the other fellows and used my pinch bar to pinch up the machine tools so we could get them on pipe rollers and work them towards the boxcar side door. Earl came back and we got the Austin-Western crane going. We started rigging out the machine tools and discovered the crane was low on hydraulic oil. We had a few gallons, but not quite enough. We had the machine tools on the lowboy in a rough position, but were going to move the rig and crane and re-arrange the load. Earl came back with 5 more gallons of hydraulic oil and we joked that the county officials and trail nuts would have a s--t fit if they saw us pouring it into the crane's hydraulic reservoir, wanting to know where the first batch of it went and wanting to do soil sampling and nail us to the barn door.

We got the rig spotted in a better location and Earl moved his crane. We re-arranged the load and lashed things solidly for the ride up to East Meredith, NY. Old firehose makes good softeners for load binder chains. Earl is 76 and I am 68, so we are a couple of old farts, but we did fine. We've been running together for 33 years, and rigging, repairing junk, fabricating stuff from more junk, driving around in old heavy trucks and running a railroad were all stuff we did together. We rigged those machine tools into the boxcar when the future seemed bright and to stretch beyond the horizon for the railroad and for the steam locomotive restoration. Now, we are old farts, the political and demographic landscape has pulled the rug (or the rails) out from under us, and we knew it was time to move the machine tools out and pass them along to someone who will appreciate and use them.

Even as we were removing the machine tools from the boxcar, the scrappers were cutting the rails and dragging them away immediately off the end of the boxcar. We are operating over the Kingston, NY portion of the line and doing surprising well financially. The Empire State Railroad Museum (ESRM) who owns Steam Locomotive 23 has no interest in continuing the restoration of that locomotive. A new generation of officers of the ESRM wants little or nothing to do with the actual Catskill Mountain Railroad and the running of trains, preferring to hold static exhibits and lease some of their property to the people running the pedal powered track cars (over a section of our former operating track). They are clearly pandering to the politicians and trail nuts and tree huggers who were carrying on about all the bad stuff associated with railroad equipment operation, repair and restoration. They wanted to get rid of the machine shop. I stepped in and made sure some of the machine tools went to a good home where I will be able to teach a new generation of people to use them to good purpose. The fellow who got the R & P lathe also got a Southbend/Elliott "Sturdimill" horizontal mill with a mess of tooling, and a 24" Rockford Hy-Draulic shaper with universal table, hydraulic tool lifter, and fresh rebuild and more tooling. I will be using those machine tools once again to make parts for Hanford Mills and teaching the Mill Manager- a young fellow in his 30's- about machine shop work.

The machine tools remaining in the boxcar consist of a 16" x 72" Monarch geared head engine lathe with taper attachment (1943 War Production Board machine), a 1930's Brown & Sharpe heavy vertical mill (number 50 NMTB spindle taper), and a Niles 30" vertical turret lathe from the 'teens. The smallest machine tool in the bunch is an Excelsior "camelback" drill. This machine is in about the best condition I ever saw this type drill in. The table has no "extra" holes, and the concentric rings for centering work and machining marks on the table are as crisp as the day it was made. The Excelsior drill and Monarch lathe will go to my buddy who was one of the founders of the Catskill Mountain RR. He's got about a 25 ton 0-4-0 Davenport standard gauge steam tank locomotive at his property, and we plan on restoring it within our lifetimes, free from the meddling of politicians, trail nuts, tree huggers and the efete snobs who took over the Empire State RR Musuem. He's got a 1960's Brockway truck tractor and lowboy, so I suppose us old farts will drive around renting the tank engine out and running it on hospitable railroads.

I ran jobs on all of those machine tools when we were going strong with steam locomotive restoration and with repairs to our diesel locomotives. The boxcar shop is awash in small parts from Steam Locomotive 23, and a second boxcar has the bigger parts stripped off that locomotive when we started restoration. Now, the museum would just as soon send all those parts to the scrapper. They have the frame and running gear and boiler, and the rebuilt tender (which we rebuilt) sitting on their property in Phoenicia, NY and are scared out of their wits to even discuss doing any work on it or restoring it. They won't hear anything about selling that locomotive to other historic railroad operators who really want to buy it and restore it to operating condition. Clearly, it was time for me to make a break with the railroad. I resigned from the Board of Directors last year. The Catskill Mountain Railroad, to survive, has gotten into the "theme train" business. Trains for Halloween, Easter, reviving the hippie era of the 1960's with a "Peace Train" (located within 15 miles of Woodstock, NY, so what else ?), and the perennial favorite of Polar Express. While this sort of thing has put the railroad in a very solid and strong financial position, it is not something I want to be a part of. I can't see myself being in what amounts to a "theme park" or "amusement park" type of operation. I am OK with repairing historic railroad equipment and even with cobbing junk rolling stock back together. I am also OK with doing engineering on bridges and acting as a consulting engineer to the railroad. I am NOT up for being in the midst of a theme park type of operation. We parted as best of friends, and I am kind of an "elder statesman". It took quite a bit for me to come to grips that the insanity of the rail trail was embraced in all quarters with support even from Chucky Schumer and the NYS governor. I swallowed the bitter pill of realization that we were not going to prevail as a political juggernaut with a full court press or screaming "greenies" and trail nuts with some big money behind them was what we were up against. Once I came to grips with that, I decided to move on. I am on tap as an engineer and machinist if they need me.

Cleaning out the boxcar machine shop was kind of "closure" for me. Sort of like cleaning out an old friend or relative's house/shop after they've gotten to the point of not being able to use any of it. Interestingly, the VP of the firm doing the scrapping got to talking with me. His firm is building a 54 Megawatt biomass powerplant since they have what he claims is "the world's biggest tub grinder" for grinding up stumps, trees, old railroad ties and similar. The plant will use wood gasifiers and run Solar gas turbines driving generators. The fellow told me they are up to their eyeballs fighting with what he called "the NIMBY's" (not in my backyard), and pretty much echoed my thoughts as to how people who holler for "green" or "renewable" energy suddenly go nuts and oppose a powerplant to do just that. He wound up asking me to get in touch regarding engineering work on the biomass plant which is still in the licensing and permitting stages. We shook hands, and as we told each other, it was nothing personal about his having the job of tearing out our tracks, but the doing of the politicians and similar types. We checked the lashings on the lowboy one more time, hugged each other and called it a day. The machine tools are in the Mill Manager's shop in East Meredith, NY and he is sussing out a rotary phase converter. I've got a load of odds and ends from the boxcar, stuff I did not remember bringing there, and stuff no one knew about. I found a Starrett 98 level in its box, and we gave that to the Mill Manager to start him off. The magnetic chuck in its oldtime crate is on a shelf in my own shop. In addition, I found a load of spools of lead-tin solder of different compositions and some was rosin core, some solid. I took most of it. I used to solder Detroit diesel radiators for the railroad maintenance of way equipment with lead-tin solder, and like to use it for odd jobs on non potable piping or electrical work. We joked that if the trail nuts got wind of the spools of lead tin solder, they'd have declared the boxcar as an environmental disaster and called for a hazmat cleanup. That's the way of the world, unfortunately.

 

[JBoogie]

No pics????

 

[jhruska]

No pics????

So well described the pictures come alive in one's own mind eye.
John

 

[crij]

Been watching the brew-ha-ha in Kingston via the computer, I feel sorry for you guys. I wish you were closer, as I know a museum in Eastern Ct that would welcome you and your toys.

We had our own fun with the trail-ers, but luckily the town likes what we have done with the roundhouse site. Even luckier we were able to convince DEEP trail people to go along the edge of our site and down one side of the driveway. Originally they tried to convince us to leave the gates open at both ends of the property so the trail could stay on the roadbed.

Hopefully greener pastures await you and your iron herd.
Rich C.

 

[kd1yt]

In some circumstances rail rails have a place, if a line is totally, completely defunct and absolutely no one at all is using it for rail purposes, because one of the purposes of the federal rail-trail law is what is known as 'railbanking' which is to keep the right of way of the corridor intact, because it will definitely not stay intact if no one at all is using it as a defined corridor (some of the old railroad easements were even written on a "so long as" basis that goes away if the use goes away). The 'railbanking' at least preserves the corridor's potential to someday return to rail use
eCFR — Code of Federal Regulations


But it is absolutely and totally lousy that your operations got shoved out. The onslaught of self-absorbed yuppiedom is infuriating, including as you mention people that yearn for renewable power then do eveything they can to block it - and the same "everythingphobia" seems to extend limitlessly. It's no longer just NIMBY, it's CAVE (citizens against virtually everything). Such people apparently believe that the materials, energy, food, and everything else that they depend on and consume appears by magic, and that their wastes also disappear by magic.

I hope the remaining parts of your organization's operations continue and thrive, and bravo for saving what you could of the precision items in storage.

 

[magneticanomaly]

I hope we technology dinosaurs are more successful at avoiding extinction than the reptilian kind were. What we know is the culmination of ten thousand r more years of learning, and its "irrelevance" to today's electronic world is a vicious delusion: our "black start" technological history is still the foundation on which all else rests.
The two-County area I live in in West Virginia has a rail-trail about 60 miles long, that a working railroad was converted into in the 1960s. I shake my head every time I see a load of chips or sawdust headed across the mountains to the paper-mill in Covington Va, pulled a paltry 30 tons at a time by Diesel fuel, when it could be getting there behind a locomotive burning more wood waste.

The Northern part of this line still has its rails, and par of it was used for a long while by the Cass Scernic (steam) railroad, a State park, using restored geared steam locomotives. his operation was taken over a few years ago by a private businessman, who has extended the line, made arrangements to connect to other relic lines, and I believe is now hauling limited freight in addition to providing excursion service.

Railroads became successful because they were economically advantageous, Steel rails are easier to roll on than dirt, or even than paved roads. Large loads are more economical to move than small. "Ecology" and "economics" have the same Greek root, and in the absence of distorting rules and subsidies, a cheaper way to do something should be less destructive of the environment.

An engineer will tell you that a truss will support a load with less material than a solid beam. The truss weighs less, and takes less steel, or fewer trees, to make. The wallet and the world both win.

I see no reason why we could not hike or bike along a trail that happened to have rails down it, and carried a couple of trains a day.

Apologies for the mostly non-technical post.

 

[4GSR]

Joe,

Going back to your opening paragraph on the shop equipment in that box car. Were you able to put a date on the magnetic chuck you found?

 

[Joe Michaels]

4GSR:

I never did find out the date or age of the magnetic chuck. It's a nice old piece, still in a wood crate with the original Brown & Sharpe logo with the square.
Still sitting in its crate as I have no need for another magnetic chuck. I've got another magnetic chuck on the shelf as well. This is an "Eclipse", British made, used but seems OK.

As to the machine tools from the boxcar machine shop:

-the Rockford 24" Hy-Draulic shaper, along with the Reed & Prentice 16" lathe and the Southbend "Sturdimill" ( British made horizontal mill) went to the machine shop of a buddy near Hanford Mills. The machine tools are working there, and I've run the Reed & Prentice lathe there for one job.

-the Brown & Sharpe vertical mill and the 18" x 72" Monarch lathe went to the automotive repair/restoration shop of another buddy who is active on the Catskill
Mountain Railroad. I've run a few jobs on the Monarch lathe in its new home. The Brown & Sharpe vertical mill sees plenty of use in that shop. I gave my buddy an
old 12" Troyke rotary table after I'd gotten a really good 12" Bridgeport rotary table. My buddy uses the Troyke rotary table on the B & S vertical mill along with a
face mill cutter in an interesting setup. He resurfaces vehicle flywheels on the mill. The flywheel to be resurfaced is mounted on the rotary table. The rotary table is
driven with an electric drill. The resulting job produces flywheels that look like they came thru a Blanchard grinder.

Happily, the machine tools got 're-homed' and are being used. Getting back to the age of that Brown & Sharpe magnetic chuck: The labelling on the crate and on the chuck give B & S's address as "Providence, Rhode Island". By the 1960's, I believe B & S had moved out of Providence and was in Kingstown, R.I. in a new plant.
Possibly the magnetic chuck dates to the 1950's. My guess is the magnetic chuck was a spare that came with a Covel surface grinder donated to the Empire State Railroad Museum (ESRM). Truth be known, ESRM did not want to continue to have a machine shop due to politics inside ESRM and at the County level. The Covel grinder is languishing in the Phoenicia, NY railroad yard, probably in a semi trailer or ocean freight container. I passed on the Covel grinder as it was a bit large for my basement machine shop. It also has hydraulic feeds, leaked oil, and looked to have been mishandled over several moves. I got a wood crate with some harden/lapped small angle plates, a sine bar and some hardened/ground fixtures for grinder jobs from the boxcar. How the Covel grinder and the stuff related to it came to us is also something of a mystery as the guy who donated it was a somewhat shady bilge rat who had to leave the area.

 

[4GSR]

Joe, Thank you kindly for the update. Sounds like all of the machinery went to a good home.
That old magnetic chuck found in its original wooden box to me is quite interesting. You don't find that done today. Now days, it's wrapped in carboard and maybe if you're lucky a thin sheet of wood of some sort.

 

[Joe Michaels]

Ken:

I appreciate the crating as it is a bygone thing. As you note, many items that used to be shipped in wooden crates are packed in foam, placed in corrugated cardboard cartons, and shipped. Or, the items are palletized and shrink wrapped. Years ago, the 'shipping department' of larger shops and businesses had men who spent their days building wooden crates. I will check the Brown and Sharpe crating to see if it is made with rough-sawn lumber. This may also be a clue as to approximate age. The men who built the crates drove common (referring to type of head) nails with claw hammers. They built some strong crates without the use of power driven 'construction screws' or the use of air nailers shooting in nails with adhesive and ringed shanks to really grip. They might have put the blued steel strapping around the completed and closed crates as a further assurance the crate would hold together for the journey.

A couple of crating stories come to mind:
-I sold a Craftsman power hacksaw to a fellow out in Washington State. I built a stout wooden crate out of rough sawn 4/4's pine, some 2 x's and plywood. The hacksaw was carriage bolted thru the bottom ( 1/2" plywood and pine cross members. The frame of the saw was held fast by a 2 x 4 bearing on it and screwed into the sides of the crate. I had the hacksaw in that crate solidly bolted, and the crate was solidly built. I shipped the saw in its crate via UPS, who gained a new meaning for UPS.

The saw arrived at the buyer's home, and he refused delivery. The crate had been subjected to some incredibly rough handling. The Craftsman power hacksaw was
a mess of smashed cast iron, and the lid to the crate had been taped back on by UPS. I got a call from UPS, telling me they were returning the saw to me. I refused
delivery. The saw arrived at the UPS terminal in Kingston, NY. I went to the terminal and a nice employee took me inside to see the carnage. The saw was broken thru
the casting with the saw frame and there was plenty of smashed cast iron loose in that crate. The impact had been so severe that the carriage bolts securing thew saw to the bottom of the crate had pulled right thru the plywood and 4/4's pine cross members. The outside of the crate was splintered and looked like it had been rolled around end for end as well as 'barrel rolled'.

I contacted UPS customer service and was told that, since I had crated the saw myself, responsibility for the resulting damage was on me. I sent a letter as a Professional Engineer and got a BS reply that since I had not used '30 psi rated corrugated cardboard cartons', the crating caused the damage. At that point, I asked some flunky on UPS' customer service line for the name and address of their head geek, their CEO or COO or whatever they call 'em. I got told this was information that could not be given out. I found it by some quick online searching. I sent the head geek of UPS a registered letter telling them of thje damage, the absurdity of the response I got from customer service (copy of that fish wrapper was enclosed). I then stated UPS had ten (10) business days from receipt of the letter to respond and make a monetary settlement. If I had not heard from them within 10 business days, I was going to start an action in small claims court an d was naming the head geek of UPS as respondent. Since UPS is a corporation, they would either have to retain a NYS licensed attorney or send a member of their corporate board to court to answer the suit. Since the head geek and the other corporate drones were in Atlanta, Georgia, I expected a settlement. I got it within those ten days. A nice lady at the UPS 'hub' in Secaucus, NJ called me. When I hear "Secaucus', I think of garbage dumps, marshland, and pig farms. That was a long time ago, but it is my opinion of Secaucus. Good place for UPS to have a 'hub'. The lady who called me said they could pay out 200 bucks for the damage done on the run from NY to Washington State. Then, she chuckled and said: "since the crate came back to NY damaged, you can get another 200 bucks for damage done on that run'. Considering I sold the saw for 50 bucks plus shipping costs, 400 bucks was a windfall. I sent that sum to the buyer of the saw. I learned from the ladies at the Kingston terminal and at the Secaucus hub just how UPS handles boxes and parcels in transit. The boxes and packages move on conveyors at the terminals and hubs. These conveyors literally dump the boxes and parcels into heaps or bins or onto other conveyors. The first boxes off the top of the conveyors get a hell of a drop. For cross country shipments, the crate was dumped into a semi trailer, no effort to stack and secure the contents of that trailer. The trailer went onto a railroad flatcar for intermodal transport. No 'do not hump' signs, no special handling, no cushioned draft gear on the UPS intermodal flats. The result was the crate bounced and rolled along the floor or on other shipments out and back across the USA. Needless to say, I refer to UPS as "United Parcel Smashers".

-Back in the late 1970's I was working for a used machinery dealer as their erecting engineer. They dealt in new and used engine and generators and also wheeled and dealed some steam turbo generators. They had sold a used Worthington steam turbo generator to a fertilizer plant in Colombia. The plant used extraction steam off the turbine for process, and ran the exhaust thru a condenser. I believe this was about a 15 Megawatt unit, and it ran on superheated steam.
Apparently, during a startup or due to some issues with boiler operation, that turbine took a hell of a drink of water. That drink of water damaged the blading on the turbine rotor as well as the diaphragms (stationary blading between stages). The Colombians called the dealer and asked for help in repairing their turbine. They arranged to ship the damaged turbine parts up from Colombia by ship, which docked at a pier in Brooklyn, NY. The dealer called a turbine blade manufacturer around Ithaca, NY, and called Brown Boveri who had opened a steam turbine repair shop in Virginia. I was assigned to the job, and it began by my going to tLaGuardia airport to pick up two engineers from Brown Boveri. We then drove to the Brooklyn pier and were let into the secured area. We had hired a stevedoring company and customs broker to handle getting the turbine parts thru US customs and released to me. The wood crates were landed near the pier, the customs inspector was on hand as were two longshoremen. The longshoremen took a couple of short crowbars and made short work of opening the crates. That is when the fun began. The Colombians had used green unroasted coffee beans as packing material around the turbine parts. We are talking several hundred pounds of green and somewhat rotted coffee beans. The customs inspector immediately impounded the entire shipment, saying the green coffee beans were unexpected and unwelcome. As such, to prevent the spread of any disease or mold spores or similar, the coffee beans were going to have to be collected and taken to a US Gpvernment facility for incineration (OK, call it a gigantic coffee roaster). The crates were also to be incinerated due to having contained the green coffee beans. The turbine parts were going to be disinfected. The COlumbians or the dealer I worked for were going to be hit with a hefty bill. I offhandedly suggested the coffee beans be dumped off the pier into the East River. Wrong thing to joke about. The customs inspectors had no sense of humor and let me know I was going to be in serious trouble if I continued that sort of talk. The two longshoremen got me aside and told me that you don't joke about such matters, that customs inspectors were itching to slap someone with as fine or worse. We left the turbine parts on the pier. I took the two Brown Boveri engineers to a Jewish delicatessen in Queens, en route to LaGuardia for their return flight. I introduced them to NY corned beef and pastrami. I never did find out what happed to those turbine parts. The dealer I worked for had another "Tiurbodyne" turbo generator of similar rating and steam conditions which the Colombians bought. They could not afford the downtime to repair the damaged unit. I imagine the coffee beans and crates wound up at Hoffman's Island, where the US Government has an incinerator for infectious or agriculural products that wsould otherwise endanger the people and crops in the USA.

 

[4GSR]

Speaking of UPS, had a similar experience from them in the early part of last year. I bought a junked-out B & S no. 2 dividing head from one of the junk yards up around Cleveland, OH. They shipped it by UPS. I think I paid more for shipping than what I paid for the DH. It arrived at the UPS depot here in my town, got a call from the depot to come up there and inspect the damaged shipment and determine if I wanted to accept it or not. The crude box made up of beaver board with a bunch of staples securing it together had pretty much come apart by the time it arrived. The DH was upside down in the box, the bottom had come out. It only had one piece broken off, the handle to the pinion that moves the plunger in/out for the index plate indexing. I think we can all tell the numerous stories of things we have had shipped or received over the years, too.
Great stories Joe, I enjoy reading every one of then you have told over the years!

 

[JST]

Yeah.... UPS. I know more than I want to about UPS.

When I worked at the music company, we sent out our rack-mount electronics packed in custom molded polyurethane foam in cardboard boxes. We started having a lot of trouble with damage in shipping. Often that damage was a bent corner on the 1/8" or 1/4" thick front panel

Rack mount equipment goes in a 19" "relay rack" (so called). It typically has a thick steel or aluminum front plate that attaches to the rack with a number of machine screws. Some of the items can weigh 60 lb, or did back then due to large power transformers in 1500 watt amplifiers. But other items weighed only a few pounds.

So, we called in UPS to see what they said. Their specs for shipping containers were very extreme. In some cases the boxes were estimated to almost cost more than the product, including the time to assemble.

One of the reps (there were two) said that the goal should be that the packed product would withstand a 15 foot drop onto concrete. This was, he said, because that is how high the conveyors are, and items sometimes fall off of them if there is a jam.

he also said that as Joe mentioned, the conveyors go to large "hoppers", with the packages dropping in on top of each other. He further said that when there is a jam in the hopper, sometimes am employee will get in and jump on the packages until the jam clears. This is not allowed, but "it does happen".

I got assigned to solve the issue. I found that we used a cheaper type of foam, and that started about when we started having problems. We had used a different one before, but purchasing insisted that they were "the exact same thing".

Investigation came up with the fact that the new foam could take one hit, but after that it was about the consistency of angel food cake. That is pretty much literal, since the rigid foam broke down and a lot of powder came out, leaving a sort of framework left that looked OK, but was very soft. it also turned out that the packing was designed "by eye", and never tested. We molded our own packing on the spot, and made the molds.

We did a lot of testing of the foams available, determining the g-forces allowed for various PSI loading etc. That was when we found that the new foam was utter crap. More testing found that our original stuff was the best of the lot, by far.

Well, over the howling of purchasing, I got the foam we were using out of the place, never to return, and we went back to the original stuff. Then I started testing product specific packaging.

Some packaging was fine, but some was insufficient even with the good stuff. So, we had to put together some rules on how to design the packing, based on the weight and surface area of the products, so that the foam would prevent the product from hitting the floor in any sort of reasonable drop.

The UPS "rules", we ignored, reasoning that we did not need to package everything for military air-drop, we'd stand the damage for a few items of we could cut it 95%.

It turned out that there are standards for shipping boxes etc, and there was a test lab local, so we had our stuff tested and certified by them. That gave us "standing" to argue about UPS damage if we had any.

It worked out OK. Shipping damage went down to a tiny fraction of what it had been.

Another fun fact. My cousin worked a summer for UPS. But he got fired.

So what was he fired for? He did not throw the packages into the truck when loading. he put them on the dock and lifted them down. Apparently the loaders wee supposed to throw, kick, or push the packages off the dock to drop into the truck. It wasn;t fast enough if you took any sort of care, you had to load the truck as if you were loading it with trap rock.

 

[Bill D]

My brother had a chainhoist at the school shop hidden in a corner. It had been evacuated from the Phillipines before Japan invaded. Co worker took the chainhoist. He took the box made of 2x4 and 2x6 mahogany. Made some good furniture from the scrap.
BilLD

 

[duckfarmer27]

Joe -

It figures you would have had fun with UPS.

Although not UPS it has to do with being a PE - your shipping story reminded me of this event in my past. I was a new employee in an odd ball engineering department in Poughkeepsie at IBM (they had eliminated the job and department they hired me for before I showed up and I was in a 'catch all' group that did all the weird support of manufacturing until they figured out what to do with me). There was a guy almost ready to retire who was a real good egg who helped keep me straight. He was one of the very few guys who had a PE license as in industry of that type there is not really a need. Whatever the rules were at the time the plant was shipping some machine out of the country and he had been asked by shipping to come down and sign paperwork on it. He told me that from time to time he was asked to do that. This time whoever was in charge had the machine all crated up and sealed and said here, sign the paper. As he was certifying what was in the crate and it's serial number he told them he would only sign after they opened the crate so he could verify. After much moaning and groaning they did. You can guess the rest - wrong machine. He came back laughing, having had a good day. Good thing all I was at that point was and EIT - took the first half of the exam (because I had to in order to graduate) but never did take the second half and get my license.

Dale