Stories
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
After a year they gave me another job, a promotion. They moved me over to the sapphire needle grinding machines. I was transferred to a small windowless room containing twelve machines, six on each side, each about the size or a little smaller than a Ford Model A engine. These sat in sheet-metal pans, with one inch sides used to catch the the cooling-oil, fed onto the needles as they were grinding. The machines were bolted to the top of concrete blocks about three by four feet in length and width, standing about waist high and tapering a few inches narrower at the top than the bottom. The machine type was primarily one elaborate cam shaft with eight or nine cams to perform the various operations, all powered by an electric motor. The oil was cooled in the next room in an old converted water-cooled soda pop vending machine where the carrier coils were folded back and forth like a radiator.
Leaving the shipping room, on the immediate right was a long narrow room with tables on three sides. There were maybe six to eight women in there whose job it was to load slender hollow tubes about the size of pipe-cleaners and a foot in length, with sapphire blanks or unsharpened sapphire record player needles. They all wore head-band magnifiers and there were microscopes galore. These blanks were called rondels and each one was about sixty thousands of an inch long and the diameter of a very thin needle. My job would be to slide this slightly smaller tube into a feeding tube in the grinding machines, and with a piece of wire push the rondels into the machine tube periodically, about every thirty minutes.
(5 of 18)
Next Page
