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A Different Kind Of Freedom

by T. Scott  Gross    

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)


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T. Scott Gross. All right reserved. For information contact Frog Pond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@frogpond.com.