Saturday, October 01, 2005

The Latest and The Greatest

It's been an eventful few days, and boy have I missed my blog!!! LOL!!! Thursday I went back to work and tried my machine, still busted. I ended up cutting the final cut with a manual mill, it came out OK (which reminds me, I took a couple pics... now I'm gonna have to post 'em so you all can see) Installed it on the machine it's going on, and it went on like it was made for it!!! LOL!!!


Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about it, the parts fit in nicely and stuff. Then I started fixing the machine up (it was missing the wheels off the trays) and cleaning them up some (the whole thing was filthy) and put the sealing jigs on. Well, surprise!!! With the wheels on it, they're too tall to fit the parts under the head!!! Actually, they'd make it under BARELY but then they'd get stuck in the clearance holes!!! So I'm looking at it, and the maintenance guy is fixing the timer (the head would go down and not go back up) and decide to make a spacer under the cylinder to boost it up a little. Trying to take it apart, I see that it's got a sleeve that threads up into the cylinder, so I start screwing it up in there to shorten it up. It doesn't work, I don't know why. The customer they'd told he could pick it up at noon. I kept saying in response, "that's interesting" LOL!!! He showed up and saw what was happening and says he'll go for lunch and come back in a couple hours. Oh yea, the day before the owner had given me a drawing that he needed modified, he wanted by afternoon the next day. My bud Rafael found me at some point in there and says the owner had been looking for me about the drawing. I told him to tell him so sorry, its gonna be Monday. About 10 minutes later the owner and the sales guy come over and starts going on (nicely) about how he really needs to get this drawing to the customer. I (grubby up to my damned elbows) tell him, OK, you take over here!!! He gets a look at the situation and sends me away to draw. About 10 minutes later the salesman comes over and asks me to go take a look at what the owner's doing, cuz he didn't think he was doing it right!!! LOL!!! I was very amused!!! Anyway, I got back to the machine a while later, and end up deciding we need to extend and boost the whole top end up, and make up these adapter plates and bolt 'em on. The customer comes back, and he's helping out, too. He was just about the nicest guy, and he needs to get it back to their plant in Mexico so they can pack out 4000 pieces for in the morning. O yea, I learned a new word in Spanish, "Chiconada", which is doing something improperly but so it works, I think it's a similar connotation as "nigger rigging". I was taking off these springs and ended up launching the wrench about five feet in the air!!! We were trying to slide the jig trays under the head at one point to put things back together and activated the cylinder and kinda smashed the side of one of my fingers, and got the middle finger of the customer bad enough to bust his fingernail. Anyway, ended up not getting out of there until after 9 at night, missed class. But I did manage to get the machine going right!!!

The next day was Sammy's birthday, and as I said here before, I took him flying with my nephew. He declared it his best birthday ever, so I guess you'd call that a success!!! I got him some memory for his comp and installed it, he's now officially a 512'er!!! I took a bunch of pics, and put them on his computer, then re-sized some of them and uploaded him to his newly opened geocities site, and tried to put together a page for him, but the MS Frontpage it comes with is nothing like the one I'm used to. I could have done better just text coding it!!! I took and made a page this morning and mailed it to him with explicit instructions on how to upload it, but so far he hasn't. So, I uploaded it to mine because you all gotta see it, you can check it here. I wrote it from his perspective, but I think it's pretty accurate. After that, we went, along with his brother, to the go-cart place we'd gone to for my birthday. But, when we were signing in the desk guy asks Sammy if he's been drinking (guess the smell tipped him off) and he answered honestly, so the guy sent us packing. We went bowling instead, three games. We played for 5 cents a pin, and I ended up taking the first game, think I got 119. That's close to my best score!!! I shall not go into detail of the next two games, but suffice to say my game went downhill. It was a really fun day!!! Sammy kept going back and looking at the pictures, he was just beside himself. He wants to get his license now!!!

Granny, you gotta check out my response to Lilly's Saturday post, I'm sure you'll be amused!!! You have such trouble with your colors!!! Don't take it so hard!!!

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