Stories
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
At some point we opened up the door in the back wall, which led to another small unused room full of more junk. We fixed it up, put in a table and some chairs, and would sit back there getting out of the oil laden atmosphere, not really noticeable, but I got Pleurisy that first winter probably from the invisible but possibly palatable thin oil mist in the air. I did a lot of analysis of the problem, working on it maybe six months.
The best part of doing set-up or repairing the machines was to mill the work-rests, which the foreman and the machinist showed me how to do. The work-rests were made of carboloid, one of the very hardest metals, and were about an inch long, by an eighth inch wide and a sixteenth thick. They had about six tiny diamonds welded in a row, as close as possible to one edge. The finished milled edge had to be of a thinner width than the rondels, about fourteen thousandths, so as to not interfere with the rollers. So a number of rests, maybe six at a time were clamped in a row and milled with a cutting wheel. One shaved them down as close as possible to the diamonds, without actually hitting them, to within as little as three thousands of an inch by eye, or one could use a magnifier. If you hit the diamonds it might wreck the milling wheel and the work-rests as well causing them some bucks. I learned the powers of the human senses, that by the process of inspecting rondels everyday in the needle machine room, that by the naked eye, I got so I could estimate the length of a rondel as seventeen, eighteen, nineteen or twenty thousands of an inch.
(13 of 18)
Next Page
