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The sapphire rondels were oil pressure driven, and so a cap had to be removed first after closing a valve on the line.
Back to outside the shipping room was a wide hallway doubling as a lunch room, which was a couple of end to end metal framed picnic tables and wooden benches and turning right straight-ahead past the rondel room windowed was a narrow hallway leading to a door where no one was allowed to go. They let me in a few times.
There was a little German scientist back there with a secret vacuum welding process, accomplished inside two foot high by eighteen inch in diameter bell jars, used mostly for welding diamonds into metals, used in the record player needles, and needle grinding machine work-rests.
The needle machines I would be working on were bought from the now infamous Union Carbide Company. The sapphire rondels when being ground, sat on a 'work-rest' made of carboloid, a very hard metal. A steel and rubber roller on either side rolled the rondels while five inch retractable circular diamond blade cut a point on them. The pressure was such that holes were worn in the carboloid creating a pot hole, which caused the rear end of the rondel to raise, which in turn caused the angle on the needle to be too small. The angle had to be, if I remember right, between sixteen and twenty degrees. This meant that the carboloid work rests had to be continually changed and perhaps Union Carbide couldn't make a profit meaning the machines were bought from Union Carbide;
and these machines were at that time the only ones in the world. Super secret no-one allowed in. So that's where the secret welding process came in.
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