h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My job is in a Die Casting factory.
The company produces a large number of different items, only a few of which I can indentify. Some are carburettor bodies, valve covers and oil pans for automobiles, and some odd bits for chainsaws and office chairs, including the spider at the bottom that the wheels snap onto.

My job has been, for most of month, to collect and empty 55 gallon drums of scrap, slag and other muck and debris, using a barrel dolly and a barrel hoist. The barrels are emptied into a tip bin, which when full has to be carried off with a forklift and then dumped into a semi-trailer.

There are 24 machines in the plant, and each one has a small reservoir furnace. Each furnace requires a barrel next to it and so do some of the machines. When the maintenance crew shuts down a machine to fix it, they often require three or more barrels to shovel all the crap from the machine into.

The die-casting machines have two-piece mold that, once completed by the action of a computerized hydraulic press, is filled with molten magnesium alloy by a computer-guided ladle. Once the metal has solidified sufficiently to remain intact, but not so cool that it welds itself to the mold, the the press releases and pops the molded item free. The machine operator then begins to punch out or knock off the unnecessary webbing left over from the mold. Then the piece goes to a worker who further finishes the piece by cutting, drilling, or filing it closer to a resemblance to the finished product.

Now my job is to fill the reservoir furnaces.
This means that I fill a giant ladle or cauldron with molten allow from a plugged sluice on the side of a much bigger furnace, running at about 1450 degrees F, take that ladle (there's a better word, but I can't think of it) around to the little furnaces with the aid of on overhead track, a compressed air chain hoist, and a wormgear with a wheel on it (for rotating the ladle for pouring), and fill the reservoirs. This simple undertaking is made complicated by the fact that the furnaces are at different heights, varying capacity, and differing temperatures. So, I am having to learn the specific characteristics of the 12 furnaces in my row. I am being taught by a very nice and patient fellow named Pedro, who speaks as little English as I do Espanol.

It is a truly frightening process, as the molten metal often pops and flies any place it pleases, and if you don't pour just right, this silvery stream of extremely hot stuff can cover your boot, melt your face off or set fire to your clothing within half a second.
I have several spot burns and a missing piece of a mustache just from this last Thursday alone.
I have to wear silver fire-proof leggings with a heavy leather tongue that is supposed to cover my instep (supposed to), a silver apron, a welders face shield, heavy cotton and sisal gloves that will protect you to a point (I have a burn mark on my left index finger from last monday that still has the pattern of the fabric on the scar), and long knit cuffs that go from wrist to past the elbow.

On top of all this, it is a ten and a half hour shift (soon to become a twelve hour shift when I get hired permanent), it is so loud in there that everyone with any sense is wearing earplugs, the concrete floor is covered coolant and hydraulic fluids, metal scraps, electrical cords, drainage ditches, pump hoses and unidentifiable muck, it stinks (or at least it did until my nose shut down), it's hot and cold by turns, depending upon where you are standing, or in my case, where you are struggling to walk to.
In my job, I also have to help clean the big furnaces with a big slotted spoon, and chip the spilled metal off the floor with a shovel.

It is a job that many have tasted for a few hours then run away. One fellow famously vomited in the furnace room before he absconded.

I'm starting to envy him.

On top of all this, the place is ten miles by odometer from my house, and I ride a bike to and from work most days, regardless of weather, which has become colder and wetter.
So, I arrive at my job already having done more work in the last forty-five minutes than some people do all week. My bike is a used Trek (made in Taiwan) that should have 21 speeds but only has four or so at the moment. The Shimano auto-selector shifters need to be replaced.

And my hands, which seem to work just fine at the job, are always in pain and curling up when I'm not.

Wow
Dangerous! Do take care best you can.

Maybe a transitional job.....
One you have paid dues, worthy of notice and reward in the future.

While by no means as rough I had some jobs that made all the rest seem cush.

Good to hear from you.

"Maybe a transitional job....."

Dream on. While several people in other positions have told me they started in the furnace room, my lead man has been doing it for 11 years. One of the fellows in maintenance is being demoted to pouring beginning Monday. Fortunately, he will be working the day shift.
I am working the night shift.

Oh, sorry, forgot to whinge about my back.
I twisted it a few years ago and this job is always finding new ways to make it sing.

Traveller in Time on top
"Keep on laughing . . . "

Sounds very Victorian in nature and brings to mind the satanic mills in 'Jerusalem'. I saw a programme on TV about a job that children of around six did in cotton mills where they had to run underneath weaving machines to sweep up the cotton waste whilst dodging the machines which could trap and crush them - and they did this for 12 hours a day. Unsuprisingly, the accidents tended to happen towards the ends of their shifts when they were more tired. Children were bought for this work.

Ah, the Gud'll Daze!

Nowadays, the sprats hang 'round the Mall while the folks are working rotating shifts.

Damned Child Labour Laws.

Your back too?
Oh my

A typically meticulous description of the foundry, tr. It sounds exhilirating, but that's probably not what you want to hear...

Be a good chap and wear the ear defenders now. The biking to work seems like the worst part of this, and I know you can't avoid that, but it will still be more dangerous than any properly-run meltshop. At least these guys have given you full safety gear; a good sign (also including kick-off boots, I hope).

You take your time with Buddy and the rest. Here in the meantime is a little something I once read off the wall at Inland Steel's 80" in Indiana Harbor, and it perfectly captures the way I feel about hot metal :

There is a River of Fire, running around the world.
It runs day and night.
It runs out of the past and into the future, and it feeds the world.
Few among millions know this.
We are the Few who tend the River of Fire.
Long may it serve us all.

It took a little bit of the gloss off when someone found out it was the Kobe Steel company song, translated from the Japanese, but hey, good rhetoric knows no borders.

Think of me when you're chipping away at slag and skull, friend, and if all of this is really not helping, then at least you can imagine you're pouring that metal over my excessively-optimistic head.

Pin

"(also including kick-off boots, I hope)"
Um, no. Mine are lace-up Red Wing steel toes.

Thanks for the song (me father and uncle once worked at Inland facilities) and the morale support.

Actually, the biking seems often the only thing that keeps me going.
It means I am fully limber when I hit the floor, and it has generated quite a bit of respect from some overweight out-of-shape types.

Thanks for the River of Fire. Beautifully done.
(One of these days, we really should meet up).
In the meantime, nice boots, but keep them laced tight 'cos slag down inside a good boot is bad news. It's the cheap leather that burns through, and that sounds like it'd be your foot...

Traveller in Time reading 'by Sigmund Floyd, call your mom!(egnever lisnot) She found your guitar!' 's entries
"Sorry for the 'ugly' spider at the bottom ?

Only this one will be all system compatible. "

Hey, TiT, it was you I guess. I get confused by all this edited by/written by labelling. Well, thanks.

An indignant lurker-colleague points out that it should be 'Ribbon' of Fire. That makes the subject very definitely the hot strip mill, rather than 'River' which is suggestive of molten metal.

But in view of tr's present world, 'river' it must stay.

Traveller in Time on top
"Share and Confuse, the hidden agenda behind this community."

Ribbon will do, also.
In view of the work I am doing now, which is, in fact, pouring, ribbon is very appropriate.
I have to watch that I don't get mesmerized by the pretty ribbon.
It's hard to remember at 2 o'clock in the morning, bundled up in safety gear, earplugs firmly in place, a face shield seperating you from direct vision, that that pretty red/yellow/silver/pink ribbon
cannot be touched and it will burn your foot off if you don't pay attention.

It seems I can have this particular job until I die, according to my lead man. Once again I have found myself working in a place a lot of people would pay to avoid the privilege of working in, and I am working in the part of the plant that everybody is glad they don't have to.

As a thinking sort of person, I find it irritating that the only kind of work I seem to have any future in is grunt work.
On the other hand, I am very happy that I am not standing next to a die casting machine all day knocking off webbing and punching out punchouts. Those people are paid pucky compared to me, and they get rotated from job to to job within the plant willy-nilly. A lot of them are temps, also, but I don't think the company wants to take too many of them on.