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At some point during the continued disturbance with Shorty, he never did speak to me again except if necessary, a shipment of old used machinery came in from the Union Carbide Company, that were again sapphire grinding machines, but this time they turned sapphire cubes into balls used in ball-point pens or check valves for liquid feeder lines. The sapphire cubes, about a sixteenth of an inch on all sides, but depending on the product they would become, were first battered around in a spinner tumbler to knock the corners off.
They were then fed into the grinding machine, which by oil circulation pushed them into and between two circular plates about twelve inches in diameter, one stationary and the other slowly rotated, where the insides were match-grooved in a spiral circle such that the sapphire started at the outside of the disks and went round and round single file till reaching the center where they passed out and recirculated again by oil fed copper tubing. The grooved plates were diamond dusted. Pressure was slowly applied on the plates so the friction would eventually round them down taking several days to a week. Too much pressure and you bust them all to hell. I did that at least once. Too little and nothing happens. Again a big magnifier was used. The finished ball had to be within thirty millionths of diameter and thirty millionths of round.
They chose me to learn the operation from the Union Carbide representative and again Shorty was furious. These machines were pretty boring stuff, but I was glad to get out of the oily needle room. And soon there became something more to do, which was watching the construction of a new addition to the plant.
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