Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[Frank S]

The other day a thread conjured a memory of when I was doing contract work at the Caterpillar rebuild shop. I don't now know which thread it was because often simple off had phrases will trigger these
Working there I often was charged with the task of building up pins or shafts and the bearing locations they were used in then line boring them hence my avatar
I couldn't possibly carry every machine or piece of equipment on my welding rig even though it was a double frame Ford F350 cab 10 ft bed 14,000lb rear end powered by a 1160 V8 cat with a 10 sp Road ranger and a 2 sp Spicer auxiliary transmission. I kept my Victor 16/40 lathe a homemade welding rotator and a homemade annealing / heat treat oven in their shop.
One day I was out on a field service call for the company while back at the shop this guy I will call "T" thought he wanted to draw some of the much higher pay rate that they were paying me So he took it upon his self to weld up a few pins on my rotator. "B the shop manager asked him what he was doing ( All of this I learned the next day when I returned) T said he needed some of the higher pay rate because his wife needed a root canal done. B told him that they would see at the end of the day but did he realize that the equipment he was using did not belong to the company. Yeah but I use a lot of frank's tools all the time and he has never said anything, besides I've watched him and I know everything there is to know about welding these pins and I can run any lathe ever made.
That should have been a HUGE red flag to B but he blew it off since T was a fairly good welder good enough to have made it through the last 2 contractor layoffs.
Skip to the next morning 6AM B and I open the shop before we even turn on the lights he says I think you may not want to see what happened here yesterday.
What's up I asked. Now B was the type of man who would not say a foul word even if he had a mouth full of excrement
Well for starters the owner nearly fired my *** yesterday for something I let T do using your equipment. But he didn't only because he had sent me out on a service call as well so no one was here to supervise the other welders. All of you contractors are professionals anyway and only need me to assign them to a job.
So what went on with T he uses some of my tools all the time I never allow him or anyone to use my machines but heck I have special tools that even the company mechanics borrow from time to time.
That's just it T was building up some pins.
Good that means all i have to do is anneal them them today and tomorrow I can turn them.
No they will have to be welded again and that is why T will not be here anymore and a new chuck has been ordered for your lathe
By now the lights have made i to full brightness but My only response to hes mention of a chuck was WHAT!!
then I saw the abomination of the work that T had tried to do. there were 6 4 inch diameter 18 inch long pins laying around the lathe that looked like they had been machined in a shredding machine no dogging lugs welded on the end of any of them. I always welded a lug on 1 end then use a dead center in the chuck and a live center in the tail-stock. but T hadn't he had tried to chuck up on the welded surface the chuck key handle was "S" shaped the chuck would not open there was a years supply of ruined carbide inserts scattered on the floor a pile of chips and thick razor spring turnings just about buried the lathe and to top it off the 1 of the 30 amp fuses was burned out

[C-Bag]

Hmmm, what a mess Frank. This thread also triggers stuff like when folks are telling jokes and it jogs something loose. And in this case and so many others it's stuff you don't necessarily want to remember.

I always seemed to be the guy who would need to use a shop tool after some bozo had destroyed the thing and slunk off. Or catch some cretin in the act...like a doofus trying to chuck up a truck brake drum on the brake lathe when it was not made for it. And over and over drop that huge drum on the mandrel and wonder why everything turned on it after was not true. Or the time the foreman's drug addled son is palletizing stuff using a roofing nailer instead of the staple gun. The guy and I prepping the pallets of machinery hear what sounds like echo's off the insulation on the wall behind us. When we realized he was using the wrong gun and the "echo" was not an echo, but the roofing nails hitting the wall above us! My partner went over and read him the riot act (very scary, I called him the human forklift)and the zombie kid just looked at him dully, then went back to doing it again. Of course there was no foreman around so we just stood on the other side of the shop and ducked until somebody showed up to find out why we weren't working. He was just moved to some other menial job, probably turning that into a deadly accident waiting to happen, but at least not next to us! Always brought back one of my Okie grandpa's many colorful euphemisms, "he could f*** up an anvil with a feather...."

[Frank S]

As a guy who actually broke the horn off a 460lb anvil with a 16 lb sledge when I was working at the blacksmith shop I know that it can't be done with a feather but it can be done LOL
We had an old anvil mounted on a stump cut off right at the ground, it was only used for things way too large for normal smithing. Clarance my mentor and his 45 year old son William were holding a large piece of steel while I wielded the sledge a Yellow jacket stung me just as I was on a down swing, the rest was but of a good laugh for years

[C-Bag]

Wow, remind me to never shake your hand. My grandpa was a blacksmith then the Dustbowl hit and he came out to the Central Valley and worked on International Harvesters for 40+yrs. he just loved to shake some poor fools hand just to hear their knuckles pop. It was our little ritual until I could match him in my late teens. I guess the lesson of the story is never underestimate the power of the sting! Or like grandpa would say, "mess with the bull and ya get the horn", or break it

[Frank S]

We had a good laugh of the anvil breaking the anvil was old and well beaten up was why it was mounted so near to the ground for things we needed to really knock the snot out of it was perfect. until I broke about 10 inches of the horn off.
William allowed that he could weld it back on so in my spare time I cut and ground both pieces until he was satisfied he rand 3 or 4 rods to get enough tack weld as we called it to hold it together then we hung a beam over the large forge and heated the whole anvil till he thought it was hot enough to take the weld. then we hauled it over and sat it on a steel table where he welded on it until late that night I kept a #12 rose bud waving over it the whole time when he finished welding we tacked some sheet metal on the table to make a box then poured heated lime over it till it covered there whole anvil about 6 " 2 days later we un packed the still warm anvil then William built up the face with hard surface rod, I ground it flat and we had for all intents and purposes a new anvil
I'd pay real money for it if I could find it today.

[C-Bag]

Just out of curiosity Frank, is doing stuff like that anvil repair science or gut feeling? How did those old blacksmiths know how hot something got? Did they use temple sticks or was it "I think that's hot enough.."?

Every old mechanic I ever worked with had his own way and if you went out on any shop floor and said "what do you think is wrong with this?" You'd get as many different answers as there were wrench twisters and what was important and what wasn't. How much was art and how much was science? The picture of a blacksmith is of some brute banging away in an impossibly hot shop and it makes me wonder is he making Damascus steel or just beating on a anvil to make his ears ring?

[Frank S]

C-bag I can only say form my experience that it is a little bit of both. A sI have said many times I started hanging around the Blacksmith shop early on in life. nearly as dar back as I can remember I have been fascinated by how things were made and why or what made them work or not work I basically started my apprenticeship with working with metals it the Blacksmith shop at the age of 11 however I can remember trying to make or alter things as far back as 4 or 5 years old plus my dad and Grandfather used to tell others stories of how when I was much younger than that my dad would lay an old furniture blanket on his shop floor put me down on it and hand me things like carburetors and distributors and tools to play with. It wasn't long before as they told it that I would be trying to take them apart.
I can remember the my first trip to the Blacksmith shop, while the reason for our visit is not clear I can remember that it did involve My Grand pa having something done that Clarance Use his forge for and he let me try to crank the blower to make the fire hotter I was barely tall enough to turn the long crank handle so I couldn't have been more than 6 or 7 at the time.
By the time I started my apprenticeship there I already had a some knowledge of the working around the shop. in the mornings i would empty the clinker and ash out of the bottom of the forges sweep up around the shop cut weeds around the outside and generally straighten things up
But your question was about the art or science or gut instinct of knowing how to tell when something was hot enough. I have to say that it is combination of these because one without the other is of little value. in itself. if a person acts on gut instinct alone he will have to develop his own science through trial and error .if a person only knows the science he will not be able to accomplish the desired results until he has tried many methods which will be chalked up as trials and errors while his experiences accumulate until he develops a gut instinct.
Learning how to tell how hot something is or needs to be takes these experiences being able to tell how hot something is by using natural substances like water lard refined oils paper wood and color visualization and rare earth powders is a learned trait. the use of temple-sticks have only become a standard in the last 40 years or so as a means of exacting the science.
I have been welding for over 50 years across a wide range of metals I can join most things together and expect them to become one but I have known many welders in specialized facets of the industry who made me look like a novice I bought my first lathe nearly 50 years ago and have machined a lot of things I have even made a couple of rifles, and lots of complex hydraulic components, but there are dozens of machinist right here on these forums who know so much more about machining than I do that if our work were to be laied side by side mine would be hucked into the rubbish bin, I've designed and built freight elevators to raise many tons at a time and steel structures several stories high. I've designed many specialized industrial machines and the list could go on and on but for anything and just about everything I know or have done I have personally met and are friends with many who know more and have done more than I will even do or know. many of them still call me from time to time just to chat or ask my thoughts about a problem they are faced with. Right now I am designing a conveyance device to transport some 70 ton precast beams on top of a building that the 350 ton crane they have available can not do for a PE friend of mine because he says that I am somehow savant in stuff like that. So I will have a go at designing it he will have it made tested and refined at his factory in Dubai then ship it somewhere else where ever his project is then hopefully it will work as I envision it
You wanted a look under the hood but I'm afraid that all you found was a model A engine in a Bugatti world.

[C-Bag]

"You wanted a look under the hood but I'm afraid that all you found was a model A engine in a Bugatti world."

You make that sound like a bad thing I'm far more suspicious of complicated and fancy than I am of plain and simple. My grandpa whom I spent a LOT of time with when young truly epitomized "don't judge a book by its cover". He had a 3rd grade education but could convey the most profound and complicated things very simply.

I used to go out to see him in the evenings after work and one day I mentioned replacing the hydrostatic unit from a John Deer lawn tractor and how I'd taken it apart just to see how in the world it worked. He proceeded to pull out stacks of manuals and flow charts that he'd gotten from the special training he received while head mech. They sent him to school several times like when IH came out with the cotton picker and the same chassis to harvest corn. They had hydro stats and at one time he was the only guy west of the Rocky's who could fix them. In a certain way his time as a blacksmith made him more than qualified to be a cornbinder mech as them things were not easy to work on. His meager tool box was mostly pry bars, short handled sledge hammers and bent wrenches. Simple, but effective.

[Frank S]

Autodidacticism is about the only true way for someone to fully understand how things function, even when attending hands on training seminars or sitting in a formal class room if a person is not somewhat autodidact they will come away knowing little more than they started.
In today's world the entire education system from pre K through post grad has been summarily reduced in its effectiveness to create the spark which ignites the yearning to learn as much as one is capable of so if an individual does not poses the gene if there is 1 which causes autodidacticism that person might as well seek out a job where they will be led literally by hand to preform the same robotic task over and over through out their lives.

[C-Bag]

I'm sure we are in the same spiral cul de sac here Frank, but I think a true autodidact is just about as obscure a term as real Homo sapiens. There are just so many people in my life that either jump started me, or dropped some mother load of info/inspiration and it would seem you have too. Maybe if we were more isolated there could be some true autodidact but we just have too much access to info. You being dyslexic would definitely be an isolating factor but I seem to remember your vast libraries so I'll be you didn't just sleep with them under your pillow. My impression is the true autodidact learns it by doing with no outside influence. And while admirable in a way, and there is a possibility they could truly be outside the box, for my limited apprehension I'm just glad to have access to places like this and folks with way more wherewithal to keep me stumbling along. I guess that makes me a manualdidact?

I also meant to give TM51 a tip of the hat for starting this thread. I just hope it doesn't somehow reach some kind of swirling critical mass and suck HMT into another dimension