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Size matters, and I’m a skinny little shit. Despite the fact that I have the wingspan of an Albatross, I have the waist of a Dachshund. I’ve always been the skinny guy. As a result of that, I’ve been the go to person to be crammed into places other people wouldn’t fit for my entire life.
There’s a tiny locomotive, currently sitting in Coopersville. A diminutive, US Army 20-ton Whitcomb that looks more like a toy train than a real one. If you ever wondered what it would be like if you cross bred a SmartCar with a Diesel Locomotive, this is it. Decades ago, when I was a twelve-year-old boy, it was owned by the Muskegon Hysterical Society. One summer afternoon, when all the king’s coffee and all the king’s men couldn’t put Whitcomb together again, I was voluntold to wedge my skinny ass in there to help change out the carbon brushes on the motor.
Railroad men don’t tend to run on the small side. Stumpy, sure, but even the “little” guys on a railroad tend to have thighs like tree trunks. They all crowded around the side of that little tan engine and watched me disappear inside through a tiny opening. I would reach out my hand with a set of brushes in it. Some nice gentleman that I couldn’t see, would take them and hand over a shiny new set. Then my hand would vanish back into the darkness of the engine bay. This process repeated and after a while a scrawny little fucker, covered in schmoo, emerged triumphant from the little door.
The amount of times I’ve been the one to go into places other people either can’t fit or won’t go is off the fucking charts. Tight, deep, high, cold, dangerous, or inaccessible has been a recurring theme in my life for as long as I can remember. The odd thing is that I enjoy it - most of the time. There are certainly exceptions, though. When you spend a lot of time doing either confined space or high altitude work, you’re going to occasionally have at least a few unpleasant experiences.
I’ve encountered a grease-tank the size of a small swimming pool in the basement of an abandoned smoked sausage factory that would not just give you nightmares, it would fuck you up for years. I’ll skip painting a vivid mental picture and simply say, you’ve never seen so many flies.
I’ve traversed a train bridge across the Grand River to explore a gigantic steel gear (it was a swing bridge in a former life), and seen a span the length of a football field that was completely covered in large, very well fed, spiders.
I once dropped into a utility vault and was all the way to the floor before we realised that we’d just come down a ladder that was two feet away from a wasp nest the size of a basketball. That was a bit scary, the terrifying part is that we were now inside a ten foot concrete cube and the only way out was back up that ladder. You couldn’t have got a pin up my ass with a jackhammer, and that is the day I learned how to run up a ladder.
But all those stories can wait for another day, because nothing, fucking nothing, compares to the peanut butter jacuzzi.
So, here is the story of why I can’t eat peanut butter.
For almost every school day of my entire misspent youth, we walked across the parking lot of the big, tan building on the corner of our neighborhood. It was the shortcut to the railroad tracks we hiked on our way to and from school. Never did we bother to learn what they actually made inside the factory, but once in a while we’d ride our bikes through the big pile of sawdust outside.
When I was 19, my Dad’s company was hired to design and build a machine for them, and I got my first look at what they actually produced there.
Bird feeders - specifically suet cakes - and tons of them! Little blocks of suet or peanut butter, mixed with bird seed, that people put in backyard feeders for wild birds. Dad’s job was to build a machine that would prepare the peanut butter for the assembly line.
It was a complicated machine with some interesting components; it looked like a large box about five foot cubed. There was a small hatch on top, about eight-by-twelve inches. It had a small ramp that sloped down to the hatch and was about two feet long. The ramp is where the operator would place a fifty-pound block of peanut butter. At that stage, the peanut butter was very similar to the stuff you’d find in a peanut butter cup, firm and almost crumbly.
The operator would place these peanut butter blocks on the ramp, slide them through the hatch, and then they would fall into the box. The only other openings to the box were where a driveshaft for the big mixing auger passed through right in the middle of the top, and a small hole about an inch in diameter on the bottom where the pipe was welded in place for the output.
Inside the box was a giant “mixing paddle” - it was actually made from a snowblower auger. It was cheaper to buy a brand new one than to fabricate the part from scratch. The auger was the size you’d find in a garden-tractor-style snowblower. It stood on end, with a block of UHMW (Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene) as a bearing on the top and bottom, and a driveshaft from a motor coming down from the top of the box.
Everything was designed to be hosed down and cleaned, and the auger moved slowly on its axis, so just making the shaft end smooth and letting it ride in a hole in a block of UHMW worked perfectly. For applications like this, it’s the “poor man’s Teflon” and works great when you need something to slide against something else, while being wet or food safe because it will never rust.
The outside of the tank was wrapped in a beautiful and intricate zigzag of copper pipe that went up and down all the way around the entire box. Hot water was pumped through the pipes to heat the entire tank and melt the peanut butter until it had the consistency of bearing grease so that it could be pumped down the line. The pipes were wrapped in an outer box shell and the space between the inner box and outer shell was filled with insulation.
The whole point was to load in about 1500 pounds of peanut butter, heat it until it melted into goop, mix it well, and send it down the pipe to be mixed with birdseed and then pooped out in little dollops into its packaging. It had to be melted, otherwise it was too thick to pump. Even the output pipe had to be wrapped with a heated water jacket or the peanut butter would solidify in the pipe and clog everything. Peanut butter is a pain in the ass to work with.
It was my job to wire up the machine that Dad had built. There wasn’t much to it, and I was thrilled at the chance to do such a serious and important job for Dad. I’d never wired up someone else’s project before, so even for something so simple, I was honored.
It wasn’t exactly rocket surgery, but I was an idiot apprentice at the time. The whole setup was run off a couple relays and thermostats. The machine was made to be set-and-forget. A motor for the output pump, a motor for the mixer, the pump and valve for the hot water… that was it - easy. No PLCs or anything fancy, just a thermostat, a couple motors, and a handful of relays in a little control box. It was as simple as it could be, and that was the point. It didn’t need to be fancy, it needed to be reliable.
I spent a whole weekend doing all of the wiring. I had a pretty solid idea of what I was doing, but I’d never worked with anything at this scale before. I didn’t even draw a schematic. It was simple, and I just kept it all in my head as I went. The first time I turned it on, one of the little Omron relays did a convincing impersonation of a grenade. A small mistake, but an expensive one. Dad got me a new relay after I changed a couple backwards connections and it came to life.
I was ecstatic. I ran and got Dad and showed him my handiwork. I was standing there beaming at the magnificent contraption that I had brought to life. There really wasn’t anything to see, but the lights came on, the motor hummed, and the relays clicked. I was beaming with pride at my accomplishment.
Dad gave it a thorough check to see that everything was working just so, and asked me to hand him a screwdriver and a pair of dikes (diagonal wire cutters). I pulled them off the bench and watched him open up the control box, which puffed out with a massive wad of orange wires when he opened the door. The wad of wires floofed out like an afro to be proud of, and was easily double the size of the small enclosure from where it emerged.
Dad gave a sigh, and simply said, “Orange?”
Orange was the first spool of wire I’d grabbed… and the only one. It was simply the closest spool on the shelf, the right size, and had enough to do the whole job.
I stood there thinking about how it was going to take me a full five minutes to pack all that shit back in there as Dad calmly unplugged the machine, walked back over to the control box, and proceeded to give it a boot-camp haircut.
I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
“What the fuck, Dad? That took me two days! It worked! How the fuck am I supposed to know how to hook all that back up? I had a system!”
“It looks like the drippings from a drunken fuck,” he said, “There’s no way we hand off work like that to a client. What you made was a prototype, now make it pretty. If YOU can’t tell how the wires go together then sure as hell no one else can either. Someone will have to fix this someday. You owe it to them, the client, and me to make this not only work, but able to be fixed easily when it doesn’t. The guy who fixes this ten years from now might be you. Now do it right.”
And that was my lesson in craftsmanship. It was a lesson cemented into my brain over the many hours I spent meditating upon the thoughts like “I’ve quit better jobs than this” and doing a mental feasibility study on leaving a few slices of ham tucked deep in the cabin air vents of his truck.
There’s a lot of guys who talk about craftsmanship and never really bother to explain exactly what that is. Craftsmanship is the hours of work you put in when the job is done and the damn thing works fine, to make it not only work well, but make it pretty. It’s a mixture of engineering and art.
Every young engineering student is taught that “Form Follows Function”. Craftsmanship is learning that “Form” can have an artistic aspect as well, and that “Function” can mean allowing it to be easier to repair, easier to clean, etc. It’s not just taking into account the machine as it is today, but as it will be in the future decades to come.
Most people don’t think of skilled labor as a form of artistic expression, but ask any electrician, plumber, framer, or welder, and they will all tell you that craftsmanship is absolutely an artform. It’s just a form of art that only those that work in the field ever appreciate, to the rest of the world it’s invisible.
Any electrician worth a damn can open a box and tell you the skill level of the original builder. They judge each other on such things constantly. It’s nuanced, subtle, and intricate. Every one of the trades does this in some way, and there’s just as much time, effort, and genius that goes into running conduit as there is for carving a marble sculpture or composing a symphony. We live in a world where the majority of our art is functional, invisible, and only appreciated by a silent army of people who are reluctant to share their secrets.
I spent another two days rewiring the machine, with proper color codes and wire routing. I spitefully used an entire bag of Dad’s good, expensive zip ties on the project. It was art.
I passed the subsequent inspection with flying colors and won the pride of my Dad.
Worth it.
A couple days later, we fumblefucked the machine on a truck and hauled it off to the factory to be installed. The millwrights did their thing and hoisted it up onto the 2nd floor mezzanine to be bolted in place. The plumbers did their thing and got the water heater hooked up. The electricians did their part and gave us a one-armed-bandit with 20 Amps of 3-phase 480. I’d done my part and was just there as a spectator. Like anyone else, I love hard work - I can watch it all day.
I sat on a pallet and ate several handfuls of gigantic raisins that were originally destined as bird feed. They were fuckin massive, tasted amazing, and went well with the show. I couldn’t believe that raisins this big were used as bird feed. They were nothing like the ones you get in the little packs for lunch. I don’t know the story on why or whatnot, but I’ve never had raisins like this anywhere else in my entire life.
By the end of the day, the machine was completely installed and everything was ready to test. All of the assorted teams were standing around with a thumb up their ass, smoking cigarettes and eating raisins, and it was time to see if all our work was successful in real-world conditions.
Dad stood with the client and gave me the go-ahead. I proudly pushed the green button that started everything up on our machine. It hummed to life and everyone was pleased. Dad spent a couple minutes kibitzing with the shop manager and letting the machine warm up a bit. Then they told the guys to start loading the tank with blocks of peanut butter.
We all watched as the guys loaded the first thirty blocks into the tank. Thirty blocks doesn’t sound like much until you realize, that’s three-quarters of a ton of peanut butter! For several minutes, one at a time, we watched them open the box, pull out the bag, open the bag, set it on the ramp, and slide the block through the hatch. The few to land inside made a bang so loud I thought it might dent the tank, but after half a dozen it was just a mild WHUMP.
It was cool watching something so mission-specific come to life, because we didn’t know exactly what to expect. This was an original and unique machine, so nobody knew just what it would sound like. Nobody knew its temperaments or personality yet. I was fascinated.
And then, it made a sound.
A bad sound.
An expensive sound.
WHUMPUMPshhhhhhhhWHUMPUMPshhhhhhhhhWHUMPUMPshhhhhhh
Three people all moved at once to slam the EMERGENCY OFF switch.
There wasn’t any way to see inside the tank from the control panel. I knew the mixer was working because the motor on top was spinning, but there wasn’t anything on the outside of the box to actually see. The shafts and gearbox were all washdown rated and enclosed.
It took about two minutes for us to figure out just what the hell was wrong. Dad grabbed a flashlight and looked through the hatch and saw that the auger was all cattywampus with the top end hanging from the lovejoy at a painful angle, and the bottom fucked off into a corner of the little square at the bottom of the tank about 4 inches from where it wanted to be. As he explained this, I turned as red as the emergency button they had pushed moments before.
I had wired mixer motor for the giant snowblower auger in such a way that it was spinning in the wrong direction. Instead of pulling the contents at the center of the tank upward, it was pushing down on it and the tank top had just enough give that when a rather solid chunk of peanut butter got wedged in between the auger and the bottom of the tank, it had climbed up out of its lower bearing block and started flopping around inside the tank.
The whole thing only moved at about one revolution per second, but it moved with authority and was chunking around against the inside of a big metal tank. Needless to say, it made a sound...
It was a trivial thing to fix. To change the direction of any three-phase motor all you have to do is disconnect any two of the three power feed wires and reverse them. It took me less than a minute with a screwdriver to get the motor turning in the proper direction.
The problem was that someone still had to get the end of the auger shaft seated back in its bearing block, and that was inside the bottom of the tank...
Which was only accessible through the tiny hatch where the peanut butter goes in...
Which was now heated to a hundred degrees fahrenheit...
Nobody said a word, nobody ever ordered me in there - they didn’t have to. There was a ten second meeting without a single word being said and where everyone gave me “that look”. It was clear that I had been voluntold.
They turned off the heat and I propped open the hatch with a piece of 2x4 that was sitting on the floor. One of the millwrights got a blower with a long yellow tube about 6 inches in diameter and stuffed it through the hatch to blow fresh air inside.
I stripped off my shirt, emptied my pockets, and started towards the tank when Dad cleared this throat.
“Um, Son, are you planning on walking home tonight?”
“Uhhhhhhh… no? Why?”
“Because if you wear those pants in there you’re not fuckin’ sitting in my truck.”
“Oh, shit… yeah……… um… I have a problem...”
“What’s that?”
“I’m… uh… I’m not wearing any underwear.”
The millwrights, the electricians, the plumbers, the client, the shop guys, and no small compliment of the line workers all got a laugh out of that one.
“You ain’t got nothing we all haven’t seen before, figure it out.”
I painfully regretted the fact that I hadn’t worn underwear since I was in elementary school, but luckily I didn’t have much time to think about it. I stripped buck naked, but put my shoes back on for protection and slipped feet-first through the hatch into the peanut butter hot tub. A pair of guys manned the hatch with the blower and held a couple flashlights looking inside so that I could see, and so they could keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t die.
It was... disgusting. The goopy mess was everywhere, instantly. At this point in my life I had long hair that hung in a ponytail halfway to my ass. The tank was over half full and I had to face upwards, reaching behind me to keep my face above the surface and still get the shaft in the hole. It took me perhaps five whole minutes to do the job, but you’d be amazed how many weeks of time can pass in five minutes when you’re the guy in the tank.
The shaft dropped in the hole with a THUNK, and the top of the tank shook. The sound was deafening, but it marked my success. Immediately, I reached out the hatch, and a pair of hands pulled me out into the cold, and now, painfully bright room. I was hauled out the hatch, dripping with hot sticky peanut butter that now covered every single inch of my entire body except for my face.
The small group of perhaps a dozen guys had grown to well over two dozen men (and a few women) when I came out of there, and they all applauded and cheered like I’d just taken the stage at Woodstock. Every single person in the whole damn shop, even all of the workers from the assembly lines, had come running to see the freakshow. The whole damn factory was at a standstill just to watch my stupid ass emerge naked and covered in slimy peanut butter from that tank. I cannot begin to express how sincerely thankful I am that this happened back in the early 90’s before everyone walked around with a camera in their pocket.
I marched my dripping, skinny, shivering, naked ass all the way to the other end of the facility where I was able to get hosed off.. By the time I’d gotten there, about a block and a half in total, the peanut butter had hardened and I was scraping it off in gobs. The moment it got hit with the hose though, it became a strange combination of hard, waxy, greasy, and even more disgusting. Eventually, I was able to get to some manner of reasonably clean.
Getting the peanut butter out of my hair was a nightmare that lasted several more showers, however, it came with a weird upside - my hair felt amazing.
My shoes, however, would never be quite right again.
I got dressed, and now that I wasn’t buck naked and dripping with shit, I got to ride on the little electric cart back to the other end of the factory. The machine was running in full swing and eating blocks of peanut butter at a rate of about three a minute. The line was happy, the client was happy, Dad was happy, and everyone in the whole place had enjoyed the most memorable line upgrade in their history.
To this day, I cannot eat peanut butter.
But, I’ll never forget to test the phasing on my motors again!
submitted by ChrisBoden to Skookum [link] [comments] https://preview.redd.it/6ww9hosm2g951.jpg?width=3300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa27405ee9f2538e0c9cb8be0a87437a556bd00f
Size matters, and I’m a skinny little shit. Despite the fact that I have the wingspan of an Albatross, I have the waist of a Dachshund. I’ve always been the skinny guy. As a result of that, I’ve been the go to person to be crammed into places other people wouldn’t fit for my entire life.
There’s a tiny locomotive, currently sitting in Coopersville. A diminutive, US Army 20-ton Whitcomb that looks more like a toy train than a real one. If you ever wondered what it would be like if you cross bred a SmartCar with a Diesel Locomotive, this is it. Decades ago, when I was a twelve-year-old boy, it was owned by the Muskegon Hysterical Society. One summer afternoon, when all the king’s coffee and all the king’s men couldn’t put Whitcomb together again, I was voluntold to wedge my skinny ass in there to help change out the carbon brushes on the motor.
Railroad men don’t tend to run on the small side. Stumpy, sure, but even the “little” guys on a railroad tend to have thighs like tree trunks. They all crowded around the side of that little tan engine and watched me disappear inside through a tiny opening. I would reach out my hand with a set of brushes in it. Some nice gentleman that I couldn’t see, would take them and hand over a shiny new set. Then my hand would vanish back into the darkness of the engine bay. This process repeated and after a while a scrawny little fucker, covered in schmoo, emerged triumphant from the little door.
The amount of times I’ve been the one to go into places other people either can’t fit or won’t go is off the fucking charts. Tight, deep, high, cold, dangerous, or inaccessible has been a recurring theme in my life for as long as I can remember. The odd thing is that I enjoy it - most of the time. There are certainly exceptions, though. When you spend a lot of time doing either confined space or high altitude work, you’re going to occasionally have at least a few unpleasant experiences.
I’ve encountered a grease-tank the size of a small swimming pool in the basement of an abandoned smoked sausage factory that would not just give you nightmares, it would fuck you up for years. I’ll skip painting a vivid mental picture and simply say, you’ve never seen so many flies.
I’ve traversed a train bridge across the Grand River to explore a gigantic steel gear (it was a swing bridge in a former life), and seen a span the length of a football field that was completely covered in large, very well fed, spiders.
I once dropped into a utility vault and was all the way to the floor before we realised that we’d just come down a ladder that was two feet away from a wasp nest the size of a basketball. That was a bit scary, the terrifying part is that we were now inside a ten foot concrete cube and the only way out was back up that ladder. You couldn’t have got a pin up my ass with a jackhammer, and that is the day I learned how to run up a ladder.
But all those stories can wait for another day, because nothing, fucking nothing, compares to the peanut butter jacuzzi.
So, here is the story of why I can’t eat peanut butter.
For almost every school day of my entire misspent youth, we walked across the parking lot of the big, tan building on the corner of our neighborhood. It was the shortcut to the railroad tracks we hiked on our way to and from school. Never did we bother to learn what they actually made inside the factory, but once in a while we’d ride our bikes through the big pile of sawdust outside.
When I was 19, my Dad’s company was hired to design and build a machine for them, and I got my first look at what they actually produced there.
Bird feeders - specifically suet cakes - and tons of them! Little blocks of suet or peanut butter, mixed with bird seed, that people put in backyard feeders for wild birds. Dad’s job was to build a machine that would prepare the peanut butter for the assembly line.
It was a complicated machine with some interesting components; it looked like a large box about five foot cubed. There was a small hatch on top, about eight-by-twelve inches. It had a small ramp that sloped down to the hatch and was about two feet long. The ramp is where the operator would place a fifty-pound block of peanut butter. At that stage, the peanut butter was very similar to the stuff you’d find in a peanut butter cup, firm and almost crumbly.
The operator would place these peanut butter blocks on the ramp, slide them through the hatch, and then they would fall into the box. The only other openings to the box were where a driveshaft for the big mixing auger passed through right in the middle of the top, and a small hole about an inch in diameter on the bottom where the pipe was welded in place for the output.
Inside the box was a giant “mixing paddle” - it was actually made from a snowblower auger. It was cheaper to buy a brand new one than to fabricate the part from scratch. The auger was the size you’d find in a garden-tractor-style snowblower. It stood on end, with a block of UHMW (Ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene) as a bearing on the top and bottom, and a driveshaft from a motor coming down from the top of the box.
Everything was designed to be hosed down and cleaned, and the auger moved slowly on its axis, so just making the shaft end smooth and letting it ride in a hole in a block of UHMW worked perfectly. For applications like this, it’s the “poor man’s Teflon” and works great when you need something to slide against something else, while being wet or food safe because it will never rust.
The outside of the tank was wrapped in a beautiful and intricate zigzag of copper pipe that went up and down all the way around the entire box. Hot water was pumped through the pipes to heat the entire tank and melt the peanut butter until it had the consistency of bearing grease so that it could be pumped down the line. The pipes were wrapped in an outer box shell and the space between the inner box and outer shell was filled with insulation.
The whole point was to load in about 1500 pounds of peanut butter, heat it until it melted into goop, mix it well, and send it down the pipe to be mixed with birdseed and then pooped out in little dollops into its packaging. It had to be melted, otherwise it was too thick to pump. Even the output pipe had to be wrapped with a heated water jacket or the peanut butter would solidify in the pipe and clog everything. Peanut butter is a pain in the ass to work with.
It was my job to wire up the machine that Dad had built. There wasn’t much to it, and I was thrilled at the chance to do such a serious and important job for Dad. I’d never wired up someone else’s project before, so even for something so simple, I was honored.
It wasn’t exactly rocket surgery, but I was an idiot apprentice at the time. The whole setup was run off a couple relays and thermostats. The machine was made to be set-and-forget. A motor for the output pump, a motor for the mixer, the pump and valve for the hot water… that was it - easy. No PLCs or anything fancy, just a thermostat, a couple motors, and a handful of relays in a little control box. It was as simple as it could be, and that was the point. It didn’t need to be fancy, it needed to be reliable.
I spent a whole weekend doing all of the wiring. I had a pretty solid idea of what I was doing, but I’d never worked with anything at this scale before. I didn’t even draw a schematic. It was simple, and I just kept it all in my head as I went. The first time I turned it on, one of the little Omron relays did a convincing impersonation of a grenade. A small mistake, but an expensive one. Dad got me a new relay after I changed a couple backwards connections and it came to life.
I was ecstatic. I ran and got Dad and showed him my handiwork. I was standing there beaming at the magnificent contraption that I had brought to life. There really wasn’t anything to see, but the lights came on, the motor hummed, and the relays clicked. I was beaming with pride at my accomplishment.
Dad gave it a thorough check to see that everything was working just so, and asked me to hand him a screwdriver and a pair of dikes (diagonal wire cutters). I pulled them off the bench and watched him open up the control box, which puffed out with a massive wad of orange wires when he opened the door. The wad of wires floofed out like an afro to be proud of, and was easily double the size of the small enclosure from where it emerged.
Dad gave a sigh, and simply said, “Orange?”
Orange was the first spool of wire I’d grabbed… and the only one. It was simply the closest spool on the shelf, the right size, and had enough to do the whole job.
I stood there thinking about how it was going to take me a full five minutes to pack all that shit back in there as Dad calmly unplugged the machine, walked back over to the control box, and proceeded to give it a boot-camp haircut.
I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
“What the fuck, Dad? That took me two days! It worked! How the fuck am I supposed to know how to hook all that back up? I had a system!”
“It looks like the drippings from a drunken fuck,” he said, “There’s no way we hand off work like that to a client. What you made was a prototype, now make it pretty. If YOU can’t tell how the wires go together then sure as hell no one else can either. Someone will have to fix this someday. You owe it to them, the client, and me to make this not only work, but able to be fixed easily when it doesn’t. The guy who fixes this ten years from now might be you. Now do it right.”
And that was my lesson in craftsmanship. It was a lesson cemented into my brain over the many hours I spent meditating upon the thoughts like “I’ve quit better jobs than this” and doing a mental feasibility study on leaving a few slices of ham tucked deep in the cabin air vents of his truck.
There’s a lot of guys who talk about craftsmanship and never really bother to explain exactly what that is. Craftsmanship is the hours of work you put in when the job is done and the damn thing works fine, to make it not only work well, but make it pretty. It’s a mixture of engineering and art.
Every young engineering student is taught that “Form Follows Function”. Craftsmanship is learning that “Form” can have an artistic aspect as well, and that “Function” can mean allowing it to be easier to repair, easier to clean, etc. It’s not just taking into account the machine as it is today, but as it will be in the future decades to come.
Most people don’t think of skilled labor as a form of artistic expression, but ask any electrician, plumber, framer, or welder, and they will all tell you that craftsmanship is absolutely an artform. It’s just a form of art that only those that work in the field ever appreciate, to the rest of the world it’s invisible.
Any electrician worth a damn can open a box and tell you the skill level of the original builder. They judge each other on such things constantly. It’s nuanced, subtle, and intricate. Every one of the trades does this in some way, and there’s just as much time, effort, and genius that goes into running conduit as there is for carving a marble sculpture or composing a symphony. We live in a world where the majority of our art is functional, invisible, and only appreciated by a silent army of people who are reluctant to share their secrets.
I spent another two days rewiring the machine, with proper color codes and wire routing. I spitefully used an entire bag of Dad’s good, expensive zip ties on the project. It was art.
I passed the subsequent inspection with flying colors and won the pride of my Dad.
Worth it.
A couple days later, we fumblefucked the machine on a truck and hauled it off to the factory to be installed. The millwrights did their thing and hoisted it up onto the 2nd floor mezzanine to be bolted in place. The plumbers did their thing and got the water heater hooked up. The electricians did their part and gave us a one-armed-bandit with 20 Amps of 3-phase 480. I’d done my part and was just there as a spectator. Like anyone else, I love hard work - I can watch it all day.
I sat on a pallet and ate several handfuls of gigantic raisins that were originally destined as bird feed. They were fuckin massive, tasted amazing, and went well with the show. I couldn’t believe that raisins this big were used as bird feed. They were nothing like the ones you get in the little packs for lunch. I don’t know the story on why or whatnot, but I’ve never had raisins like this anywhere else in my entire life.
By the end of the day, the machine was completely installed and everything was ready to test. All of the assorted teams were standing around with a thumb up their ass, smoking cigarettes and eating raisins, and it was time to see if all our work was successful in real-world conditions.
Dad stood with the client and gave me the go-ahead. I proudly pushed the green button that started everything up on our machine. It hummed to life and everyone was pleased. Dad spent a couple minutes kibitzing with the shop manager and letting the machine warm up a bit. Then they told the guys to start loading the tank with blocks of peanut butter.
We all watched as the guys loaded the first thirty blocks into the tank. Thirty blocks doesn’t sound like much until you realize, that’s three-quarters of a ton of peanut butter! For several minutes, one at a time, we watched them open the box, pull out the bag, open the bag, set it on the ramp, and slide the block through the hatch. The few to land inside made a bang so loud I thought it might dent the tank, but after half a dozen it was just a mild WHUMP.
It was cool watching something so mission-specific come to life, because we didn’t know exactly what to expect. This was an original and unique machine, so nobody knew just what it would sound like. Nobody knew its temperaments or personality yet. I was fascinated.
And then, it made a sound.
A bad sound.
An expensive sound.
WHUMPUMPshhhhhhhhWHUMPUMPshhhhhhhhhWHUMPUMPshhhhhhh
Three people all moved at once to slam the EMERGENCY OFF switch.
There wasn’t any way to see inside the tank from the control panel. I knew the mixer was working because the motor on top was spinning, but there wasn’t anything on the outside of the box to actually see. The shafts and gearbox were all washdown rated and enclosed.
It took about two minutes for us to figure out just what the hell was wrong. Dad grabbed a flashlight and looked through the hatch and saw that the auger was all cattywampus with the top end hanging from the lovejoy at a painful angle, and the bottom fucked off into a corner of the little square at the bottom of the tank about 4 inches from where it wanted to be. As he explained this, I turned as red as the emergency button they had pushed moments before.
I had wired mixer motor for the giant snowblower auger in such a way that it was spinning in the wrong direction. Instead of pulling the contents at the center of the tank upward, it was pushing down on it and the tank top had just enough give that when a rather solid chunk of peanut butter got wedged in between the auger and the bottom of the tank, it had climbed up out of its lower bearing block and started flopping around inside the tank.
The whole thing only moved at about one revolution per second, but it moved with authority and was chunking around against the inside of a big metal tank. Needless to say, it made a sound...
It was a trivial thing to fix. To change the direction of any three-phase motor all you have to do is disconnect any two of the three power feed wires and reverse them. It took me less than a minute with a screwdriver to get the motor turning in the proper direction.
The problem was that someone still had to get the end of the auger shaft seated back in its bearing block, and that was inside the bottom of the tank...
Which was only accessible through the tiny hatch where the peanut butter goes in...
Which was now heated to a hundred degrees fahrenheit...
Nobody said a word, nobody ever ordered me in there - they didn’t have to. There was a ten second meeting without a single word being said and where everyone gave me “that look”. It was clear that I had been voluntold.
They turned off the heat and I propped open the hatch with a piece of 2x4 that was sitting on the floor. One of the millwrights got a blower with a long yellow tube about 6 inches in diameter and stuffed it through the hatch to blow fresh air inside.
I stripped off my shirt, emptied my pockets, and started towards the tank when Dad cleared this throat.
“Um, Son, are you planning on walking home tonight?”
“Uhhhhhhh… no? Why?”
“Because if you wear those pants in there you’re not fuckin’ sitting in my truck.”
“Oh, shit… yeah……… um… I have a problem...”
“What’s that?”
“I’m… uh… I’m not wearing any underwear.”
The millwrights, the electricians, the plumbers, the client, the shop guys, and no small compliment of the line workers all got a laugh out of that one.
“You ain’t got nothing we all haven’t seen before, figure it out.”
I painfully regretted the fact that I hadn’t worn underwear since I was in elementary school, but luckily I didn’t have much time to think about it. I stripped buck naked, but put my shoes back on for protection and slipped feet-first through the hatch into the peanut butter hot tub. A pair of guys manned the hatch with the blower and held a couple flashlights looking inside so that I could see, and so they could keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t die.
It was... disgusting. The goopy mess was everywhere, instantly. At this point in my life I had long hair that hung in a ponytail halfway to my ass. The tank was over half full and I had to face upwards, reaching behind me to keep my face above the surface and still get the shaft in the hole. It took me perhaps five whole minutes to do the job, but you’d be amazed how many weeks of time can pass in five minutes when you’re the guy in the tank.
The shaft dropped in the hole with a THUNK, and the top of the tank shook. The sound was deafening, but it marked my success. Immediately, I reached out the hatch, and a pair of hands pulled me out into the cold, and now, painfully bright room. I was hauled out the hatch, dripping with hot sticky peanut butter that now covered every single inch of my entire body except for my face.
The small group of perhaps a dozen guys had grown to well over two dozen men (and a few women) when I came out of there, and they all applauded and cheered like I’d just taken the stage at Woodstock. Every single person in the whole damn shop, even all of the workers from the assembly lines, had come running to see the freakshow. The whole damn factory was at a standstill just to watch my stupid ass emerge naked and covered in slimy peanut butter from that tank. I cannot begin to express how sincerely thankful I am that this happened back in the early 90’s before everyone walked around with a camera in their pocket.
I marched my dripping, skinny, shivering, naked ass all the way to the other end of the facility where I was able to get hosed off.. By the time I’d gotten there, about a block and a half in total, the peanut butter had hardened and I was scraping it off in gobs. The moment it got hit with the hose though, it became a strange combination of hard, waxy, greasy, and even more disgusting. Eventually, I was able to get to some manner of reasonably clean.
Getting the peanut butter out of my hair was a nightmare that lasted several more showers, however, it came with a weird upside - my hair felt amazing.
My shoes, however, would never be quite right again.
I got dressed, and now that I wasn’t buck naked and dripping with shit, I got to ride on the little electric cart back to the other end of the factory. The machine was running in full swing and eating blocks of peanut butter at a rate of about three a minute. The line was happy, the client was happy, Dad was happy, and everyone in the whole place had enjoyed the most memorable line upgrade in their history.
To this day, I cannot eat peanut butter.
But, I’ll never forget to test the phasing on my motors again!
