Welding Work

Holy Mother of Melted Metal, I'm exhausted. I haven't gotten used to getting up at 5am yet, and every morning I catch myself thinking, I'll call, invent an excuse for not going in, and go back to bed, but I yell at myself and get up anyway.

I like the work I do, and it's easy, mostly-mindless stuff, so I can still do it when I've had very little sleep. One of my coworkers bugs me, but I'm learning to tune him out. This is the company I work for, and the bunches of blades in those fan-shaped things are what I make. Sheet steel comes into the building and goes to our massive (about 20' square) laser cutter. It mostly-cuts the blades for each job, and then the blades come to my area, Barset Assembly. My partner and I run the sheets through a Timesaver (big belt sander) to get the burrs from the cutting process off. Then we "break" the blades (snap them out of the rest of the sheets), arrange them by type (usually between four and seven types of blades, depending on the size of the barset), and "build" the sets by assembling the blades in the correct order. We put small spacers between the blades (creating the grooves) and then put each barset in a clamp. I put on my welding helmet and fuse three to five lines across the back of the barset (depending on the set's size) and one line along each cross-section edge. The sets get run through another Timesaver to make sure everything's even, and then they go on to the next step in the process... which I don't watch because I'm too busy building more sets.

So yeah, that's my job. I haven't done any knitting since I started working, but I'm going to make time to finish Askew #2 this weekend. SFF asked about Rhinebeck... I'm not sure if I'm going this year. If I go, it'll only be on Saturday, and I probably won't buy anything except maple cotton candy.

Time to go take a shower and curl up in front of the TV for a while.