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By the time I made it to
the shop, the place was jumping. Noise like you can’t imagine coming from
monster-sized machines and clanging metal that sounded like it was being dropped
from great heights on purpose. In a matter of minutes, I was tossed an apron and
leather gloves by Gary, another Midwesterner who had spent so many years with
these belching machines that he had started to look like them. My first assignment was
to work the bar shear, wrestling long slabs of solid steel into the mouth of a
huge shear. Apron, ear protection, shiny metatarsal guards over my shoes, heavy
gloves and, oh yes! The glasses. Line it up, ca-chunk,
clank and the first piece falls onto a metal conveyor that sounds like an Army
tank in heat. It drops lifelessly into a metal hopper that, when full, will be
switched like a miniature railroad car and pushed along a track to a waiting
blanking shear. Ca-chunk, clank;
ca-chunk, clank. One loud idea after the other. I thought I was really wailing.
“How’m I doin?” was all I could think. “Writer Boy isn’t quite the
pansy you thought, huh?” One ton of steel and two
eternities later, Gary moved me to the next machine. An old guy strapped on the
side apron that I had left on the machine and within seconds it took on the
rhythm of a machine gun. (Guess Writer Boy wasn’t so fast after all.) For the rest of the day,
I stamped and pressed, packed and hoisted. My face turned black and my back
started to burn. All the while I watched to see what there was to see.
Lunch was from 11:00 to 11:30, a little early for my blood, and eaten
within 20 feet of the belching monsters of the furnace and press. The guys may
just as well have been at Denny’s. They bent over the newspaper and shoveled
their food as quickly as they moved steel, with the same disconnected lack of
attention. After lunch there was a
surprise. We had reached the end of a run and were going to have to change over
the equipment. In many, if not most
factories, when the tooling must be changed, the engineers are called. This is
complicated, specialized, very precise work. Not something left to some factory
grunt who doesn’t give a hoot about quality. Not here. Not at Deere. And
definitely not in Department 27. The tool shop was called
and within minutes, a cowboy riding a forklift arrived carrying a $30,000 metal
die perched at the end of its two long forks. The driver, an engineer, gently
deposited the baby and offered to assist but, like Tom, the department
supervisor, he did not command. Puwusssh! The huge,
100-ton press hissed and opened its jaws. Like a dentist working on a tiger, the
operator shoved a block of solid steel into the maw just in case the sleeping
giant were to awake and snap. A work light was found and within minutes, the
surgery had begun. One surgeon, five in the gallery. When the work was done, a
cold blank was shoved into the furnace as a test. Out it shot, red hot and
dangerous. The operator snapped it up on long metal tongs and deftly laid it
against the ‘bumps’ in the press. Ca-chunk, pussssh and the plate was
transformed, still red hot, shooting down the line. Six sets of eyes watched as
another operator snatched it up and passed it to yet another set of tongs and
eyes. A die was pressed into the holes that had been punched by the press. “Not quite. What do you
think?” a sweaty player offered as he tried the die for size first one way and
then the other. “It’s okay. But the
countersink could be a little deeper. Let’s adjust and see what happens.” Now here’s the point.
These guys could have said ‘good
enough’ and gotten on with the business of piecework. But they didn’t. These
guys are pros. Real craftspeople of the kind to whom this country owe its
greatness and reputation for quality. The department was down
for the better part of an hour while the new die was adjusted then adjusted
again. Finally, when the product was perfect, absolutely perfect, the ca-chunk,
clank started again in earnest. At the other end of the
line, finished parts drop with a clatter that is simply unnoticed in the din
from the rest of the shop, although when I first heard it, I asked if we were
near a railroad track. It’s that loud, like a train hustling through your
living room. Keith reached a gloved
hand into the hopper of confused parts and fished out a couple of samples. Then
we slipped into a quiet room just off the work area. Quiet spaces at Deere are
few and far between. Inside, Keith cozied up to a computer keyboard that
ultimately controlled laser-guided measuring equipment, the kind you would
expect to find in a pristine laboratory guarded by serious-looking technicians
in crisp, white lab coats. Keith, rough looking,
addressed the bank of space age technology to measure the samples for accuracy
and hardness. From the looks of them,
you wouldn’t expect any of these guys to be monitoring sophisticated
computer-based production control equipment. But they did, manipulating the
controls with all the grace of the artists that they are. Nor would you expect
to see quality control in the calloused hands of the men who produced the
product, responsible for blowing the whistle on themselves should their work be
ever so slightly out of spec. But
they did. Keith showed me how to
read the laser system that measured the parts to a thousandth of an inch. I
still don’t grasp the importance of such accuracy for something that attaches
to a plow. We’ve digging in dirt, not repairing heart valves! But I leaned in close,
not so much to understand the process as to witness the result. Maybe that is
the lesson: that we all need to be connected to our work. That even sweat can be
meaningful. And that, so long as it’s one of ‘our guys’ doing the
measuring, even if I can’t see ol’ Keith back there, I feel good knowing
that what I do counts. Bingo! We were right on the
money! I felt as if I had made them myself. In a very small way.
I had. (Excerpt
from BORROWED DREAMS: The Roughest,
Toughest Jobs on the Planet and What I Learned from Working Them. Our Time
Press, 1999. T. Scott Gross) |
