Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[C-Bag]

I got my copy of Machinery Repairman 3-4 and my first impression was why did they not blow the original up to fill the new page? It's mighty small print( but that seems that way with all print to these aging eyes ) and its got quite a margin of unused blank page where they could have blown it up and killed two birds with one stone. Then they seemed to have had a problem with getting a centered scan because on pages here and there some lines of text at the top of the page were not reproduced. Who knows if that going to be crucial and was that how the original was? The pics have that not that high of quality scan look to them, but all in all, it's easy to understand and has held my attention. So it should do nicely to try and fill the huuuuuuuge gaps in my knowledge.

Thanks again TM51 for bringing this to my attention as this was a much needed primer.

[C-Bag]

Well, good luck and I hope you land a good one TM51. I could never seem to hit that sweet spot where I got paid appropriately and had interesting work. But I'm sure your resume is far better than mine.

[Frank S]

I sensed this in #26 good luck in your search.
On another note things which are in your favor have a tendency to become minor but all too often major detriments.
Being an experienced highly skilled craftsman with a stellar work ethic augmented with inventive work through/around skills.
May be viewed the eyes of some potential employers as a threat. Particularly if said person is not yet comfortable with their managerial skills. These persons are often the son-in-law or nephew or some other person promoted without having paid their dues.
The opposite side of the coin will be an employer who would rather surround their-self with the very best persons they can find. These employers will not care one wit that they cannot understand a potential new hire's C/V or resume. To them it may come off as gobbledygook.Their decision will be based more on the face to face interview.
During my life's work I have joined with 2 companies both of which I could have cared less if I joined with them or not. My base salary before offered enticements would have been more than adequate. However in one case my decision to try and assist in propping up or staying aboard a sinking ship almost until the masthead made contact with the seas can only be blamed on my work ethic. I did come out ahead even though I never collected on nearly 4 years worth of base salary.
My loss in the second I can attribute in-part as my fault for holding onto the belief that most people are honest but sometimes circumstances beyond their control all too often enter into play. To this event I harbor on ill will.
Talking about C/Vs during my tenure at the second company we were bidding on a quite substantial contract. At the consulting engineers meeting our company had in attendance the owner, myself and 25 of our most promising young engineers. We were in no way low or even competitive bidders if the contest had been based solely on the dollar cost figure. Actually out of 10 perspective bidders we were 2nd highest A company in Northern Europe was only slightly higher than our bid.
Two key aspects won us the bid. #1 our company had a very impressive portfolio which included very detailed C/Vs of all our staff engineers not withstanding (over 1000 pages in all) #2 we were a local company albeit considerably smaller than many of the others both local and off shore, We were willing to expend the funds to purchase any and all equipment required for completion of the contract.
Never dumb down so to speak when it comes to one's resume or as I often call it C/V curriculum Vitae

[Paul Jones]

TM51,

I wish you the best with finding a company where your talent can be fully utilized and appreciated. The third generation metallizing plant is unique because the odds for a company making it through successfully past the third family generation is not very high.

I know this personally from a good friend whose father started a very successful water pump company but died while he was in college studying mechanical engineering. He came home to help his mother and brother to keep the company running. The sons had work there for many summers but did not know all the details and had to learn fast. Nonetheless, they figured it out, he eventually got his ME degree and the brother a business degree, and turned the company into a tremendous success.

Now the brothers are my age (mid to late sixties) and their kids are taking over running the company. Their kids are all hands-on and worked their way up from sweeping the floors to working all aspects of the company from doing the machining, customer sales, and engineering. The company has a minimum of 18 month backlog on orders and all by word of mouth. I love during shop tours and have been there when testing 100,000+ gallons/minute pumps with 1000 HP+ electric motors and they build ones twice that size. They have a 10 acre lay-down area used to store castings and house the pump test tank (the tank looks like a large and deep swimming pool with lots of horizontal baffles to slow down the return stream of water from the pumps). They gave me a 12"swing gap bed geared head lathe from their maintenance shop because it was the too small for their current maintenance operations and thought I could use it for my hobby machining (I had to acquire all the QCTP and tooling but very appreciative of the lathe which was in great shape). All their pump designs are parametric and can be scale in any size to fit various CNC machining centers where the largest can swing 72" (and it has a couple of conveyor belts to remove the flood of chips). They even added risers to a big swing Mackintosh-Hemphill lathe to further increase its swing. It was one of the lathes used during WWII to re-machine the 16" gun barrels for the Iowa class battleships. However, I think their new large CNC slant bed lathe is taking over the work performed on the Mackintosh-Hemphill lathe. The kids all have ME and business MBA degrees and I they are already taking the company to the next level with world-wide sales. My friend who is in the middle generation knew about other third generation companies failing so they did things right to make sure the kids were involved early on and well prepared to run the company.

Have a great three day weekend,

Paul

[PJs]

Boy you guys cover a lot of ground quick. The cul-de-sac is feeling like a circle track at speed.

First, TM I wish you the Very Best in getting something that suits your skills, acumen and pays accordingly for them. I had the same feeling like Frank that things were heading south by your frustration with dipstick 1 & 2. Resume's are an interesting thing to me and found that a more bullet point single page with a cover letter is what most HR's are looking for. The key to me is in the cover letter and letting them know you walk your talk and how your acumen will benefit them. On the other side of that, most of the jobs I have taken have either been offered or because I Knew I was going to work there and went in, looked em in the eye and shook their hand and off it went.

The toughest resume driven one was with DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) back in the late 80's. I wanted to move more into computers and communications electronics so I could use my edumucation and knew an engineer there. Got called for an interview...Oh my 9 different people, 4 of which were an inquisition panel over two days about 4hrs each day...grueling to say the least. I was pushing forty then and told them what I wanted for compensation...mainly because they wanted me to go to China to oversee their new manufacturing facility and work with the engineers there...a month at a time, several times a year for a couple of years. Would have been a great opportunity at some level but had just gotten custody of my son...which I would have to have worked out. They made an offer about 15% lower than I wanted. Bottom line was they hired a newbie just out of school, paid him chump change and probably road him till he dropped. Funny too because DEC sold to Compaq in the late 90's because the China thing didn't work out, at least from what I heard. Whew, dodged that bullet. Best of Luck Bud!

Paul; I have to say thank you for bringing some good light to the DPLA link. I look at foot notes too in wiki but not all the time, but this time it really took me down the rabbit hole and researched them the donors, staff, projects, etc. Some Great donors there with Cred. Mostly I was impressed by reading their strategic plan. They have a tough row to hoe with infrastructure and legal/metadata but the heart and purpose is in the right place in my book. I won't give them my email address but if I had any $$ to donate I would.

As for boring some of us (What?) are you kidding? Hopefully I'm not the only one that really loved hearing about all that stuff you did back when core memory was a Big Deal and hand made, let alone hooking mini's together via I/O...Oh My fun stuff I bet. CPM at the end of its time is about as far back as I go, then Osborne's, worked with a couple of Cupid Systems...till now i7, but would love to have a dual Xeon for my graphic box though. I am curious what language you used for your equations(?) or was it all in some machine language...don't know much about the Nova's if that is what they were. That flow analysis software I worked with was probably a descendant of some of the stuff you guys came up with back then. Sorry I get carried away (or should be) but would love to hear more any time your up for it.

Also thanks for great story and the insights on your friends 3 gen pump business...Those are some Big Pumps! Family stuff can be a bit daunting through the generations but sounds like they handled it well as a tight knit family starting young.

C-Bag; Glad you got your book and hope you get some good stuff from it. Too Bad about the aberrations but it happens with unskilled scanning and PDF generation.

My hat is off to all of you here and on this forum...This Labor Day should be a celebration to us all for what we've brought forward over the years. Happy Labor Day! Salute!!

Till Then,
~PJ

[Paul Jones]

PJs,

I did not plan to get into computing when I applied for graduate school in geophysics. Ironically the grad school for the marine geophysics program wanted me because I knew how to design and build oceanographic equipment (I worked my way through undergrad as a prototype machinist for building underwater instrumentation) and offered a research assistant position that totally paid for grad school and living expenses. When I was 16, I told my parents I wanted to get a PhD in an interesting field of science and probably related to some aspect of oceanography but in a field that paid extremely well.

However, on my first day in grad school my major professor provided a computer ID and password, and said you will be working from now on with computers and not building geophysical equipment. I was delighted because I could already see where things were headed with computing. I became totally immersed in computing, numerical methods (conversion and approximation of equations into computer code), special function theory, and of geophysics. I minored in mathematics but enrolled in more 400 level and graduate math classes than in geophysics. Most of the integrals and partially differential equations in reflection seismology geophysics have four variables, x,y,z and time, use complex numbers(real and imaginary parts) and lots and lots of dot products. The language of choice in the 70's and 80's was FORTRAN because it handled all the housekeeping for complex numbers, double precision, and matrix multiplies and divides. The compilers in grad school were much simpler than later when I did supercomputer using compilers with three passes for syntax and symantics, the vectorization (instructions for the arithmetic unit to minimizes wasted wait cycles), and the parallelizaton (dividing the compute tasks across all cpu's and synchronizing intermediate results for the next step). You could ask the compiler to dump out the FORTRAN source code after finishing the third pass just for grins, and it looked nothing like what you wrote going in.

That is how I got into computing and never regretted making this decision. After grad school I was offered dozen of jobs in oil and gas exploration because of my geophysics degree and extensive knowledge of computing (the first oil embargo was 1973, the year I entered grad school, I got my PhD in 1978 and wham we had the second oil embargo in 1979). I developed proprietary 3D seismic reflection processing algorithms used for processing 3D data for closed bids to oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Getting the data wrong could mean leaving $100 million on the table compared to the next bidder, and hence the quest for supercomputing to allow multiple data processing runs before submitting the bids. I loved the job but the company put me on an executive fast track program where my last assignment at age 40 was CIO and also president of a telecom subsidiary (lots of world-wide telecom and also pipleline SCADA that we converted to VSAT, and used VSAT for credit card in the pump for extremely fast transaction processing with our own 6.3 meter dish). I never got back into geophysics but I retired when I turned fifty. I now work because I want to and enjoy mentoring employees and learning new and different technologies.

Well, that is how I ended up where I am today. Along the way, I have been a hobby machinist probably starting at age 14 and by 16 built my own metal lathe (looked like a Unimat SL but with a 6" swing). I would use my free period in high school in the school library reading every book on machining, machine tool theory and mechanical engineering. I am still an experimental scientist at heart even if I can only read about it now rather than doing it.

Have a great Labor Day Holiday,

Paul

[C-Bag]

Never bored Paul, just astounded. That's quite a ride.

[Toolmaker51]

LABOR DAY 2016

Apologizing on that format; a bit teeny. Click on a couple times, it enlarges fine.

[PJs]

LABOR DAY 2016

Apologizing on that format; a bit teeny. Click on a couple times, it enlarges fine.

Nice words TM, Think you are right...if we made a think/do tank...Oh My!

[PJs]

Paul,

I have been on the blessings side with "ask and receive" lately and man did you deliver! Thank You for sharing this with us!! Quite a Journey to say the least and lit so many candles for me it will take days to get through all the rabbit hole diving. Spent about 2 hours after you posted this and barely scratched the surface, and needed some time to assimilate before responding.

It is most interesting to me about the paths and seemingly innocuous turns we take sometimes that turn an underlying goal into an adventure that brings us so much more, as yours obviously did. Those had to be some exciting times working on cutting edge machines and writing 3D vector math into them with a time function. Had a feeling it was FORTRAN as a defacto standard for science back then...still is but morphed to more object oriented. The amazing thing I learned was you were using it in concurrent form way back then.

Here is a link some might find interesting I found on my rabbit hunt around your 1Mips comment. Top 500 The list. I know these are FLOPS but still, We've come a long way is right...now heading toward 10M cores.

It's funny for me with math. In grade, Jr, & HS I was well ahead, doing 3d vectors in my 1st year geometry class freshman year because it fascinated me and the standard stuff was too easy (boring and Another reason your work fascinates me so much). HS Trig was very fun/easy and calculus was ok. However I crashed and burned my first semester college Calc, mainly because the teacher was one of those that wrote with 1 hand & erased with the other and little lecture and no TA. The book helped but it all seemed geared to memorizing the ~220 basic formulas, no why's or basic logic to me. Took it in summer to make up and about three hours into it with a different teacher the light finally came on. I had never got anything less than an A or higher until then but made it through 2 semesters of differentials finally with B's. After that they were laying off Phd. EE and took a different path for quite a while, Retail and turning a wrench so I didn't use much above HS level. Even once I got through some ME stuff and Cad and actually did some engineering for all those years it never got used a lot and by that time we had Spreadsheets & MathCad. Probably the most high level was in the flow dynamics stuff and that was pretty much built in. Another interesting journey on a different path...but still like to do sacred geometry with a pencil, ruler and compass. ;-) and in my graphic work too.

The "reflection seismology geophysics" is so fascinating and only scratched the surface in my dive. It's interesting to me partly because of the sound side with the density issues you would have to contend with...let a lone noise. It's also right up my alley because of my long interests in particle theory...actually talked mom in to buying George Gamow's book on particle physics ($40 at the time) for me in HS. Could you please explain "and lots and lots of dot products"? Just didn't get the reference. 8-)

That was quite a fast track, and here I thought 14 balls in the air at once was a lot. Interesting that you piggy backed SCADA with CC data on VSAT...not sure I understand how that might be accomplished and keep it stable (no delays or crash and burns). I would bet its proprietary, yet very coool! I worked with SCADA and HMI stuff in my latter years and enjoyed being able to have a GUI tied to PLCs and such...a systems guy at heart I think, but for me those turns that led me down the R&D paths were some of the most satisfying...and frustrating sometimes.

I am most grateful for your sharing here, the kindness of personality you have brought to HMT, and your wherewithal! An Honor, Thank You!

~PJ