Chilly you remember these?

[Aunt Phil]

Rigid 500 was one of the finest pipe lathes ever made.

[Bill Houghton]

There's a pipe lathe in that picture?  Oh...oh, yeah, there it is.  Got distracted.

[Northwoods]

Rigid?  Absolutely!

[Chillylulu]

We just called them power machines. Mostly used Rigid 300's, sometimes you'd get stuck with a 535. 500's were gone by the time I indentured in 1982.

My favorite machine is a Rigid 1224, but, if I could only pick one it would be a 300. One major reason is that most groovers won't fit on a self-oiler, and almost anything over 1-1/2" pipe is grooved.

Chilly

[Aunt Phil]

Grooved is for kids.
If you can't thread it go back to the Hall and sit on the bench.

If this silly grooved pipe trend continues next generation will want carts to move the dang pipe with.

[Yadda]

Grooved is for kids.
If you can't thread it go back to the Hall and sit on the bench.

If this silly grooved pipe trend continues next generation will want carts to move the dang pipe with.

We are a spoiled lot.  Drive with one foot.  Don't have to get off the couch to change channels.  More than 4 channels on the TV  and cordless phones....

[Aunt Phil]

I just heard the man who invented the TV remote control died.
They found him cold, between the couch cushions.

[Chillylulu]

The one thing I never designed or installed was "poz-lok" pipe. Plain end pipe that connected with fittings that were held to the pioe with attachments you hammered on.

Grooved piping is here to stay,  Aunty. Can't find kids willing to use pipe wrenches, but cordless impact drivers are good to go.

Chilky

[Aunt Phil]

Used to be a company here called Kodak, you may have heard of it.  It was a thriving company that was managed well for over 50 years, till Institutional Investors brought their man in to increase profit.

Back in ancient times George Eastman who built the company got annoyed at the phone company, and bought himself enough phone stock to become the first interconnect phone user in the country.  All phones inside Kodak were owned by Kodak.  There were no payphones inside of Kodak, only outside the fence.

When pipe welding became reliable, Kodak welded every possible pipe INCLUDING Sprinkler systems and Steam.  They even installed pneumatic tube systems that connected with thermal setting glue inside the fittings. 

Craftsmanship counted once Chilly!

Last 30 years there have been fewer and fewer Craftsmen, and more "Can't see it from my house" slam it in clowns.  The slammers made me enough money to sit back and do as I damn well choose.

Slammers and halfass are the current state of acceptable, and both are the reason it now requires a Crane Operator to sit through hours of meetings to make a 10 minute pick.   College "educated" people who CAN'T do the job now spend hours telling competent people how to do the job. 

The slogan at General Electric used to be "Progress is our most important product.".  Since Jack Welch the slogan is We buy crap from wherever, slap our label on and sell it for high Dollar. 

I've watched too many shops and too many plants shut down in the last 20 years thanks to kids with laptops making decisions to be executed by trained monkeys.  Kodak= gone, Xerox = history, Bausch & Lomb = toast, Delco= what happened, Rochester Products = huge empty building, and this week Sentry Safe = moving to Mexico.  I can't begin to count the number of times I've heard a fool with a computer tell me "I have a Degree" nor can I remember how many times I've heard "That's beyond my discipline" from a meatball waste of breathing air with Credentials.
The only industry growing in this area is Welfare!

What's the prize for the generation that looses the most skill and knowledge?  We're already past the point of having people too dumb to use Google to find the answer.

[Chillylulu]

The machine age has been replaced with the information age. It's progress.  Kodak were the masters of their own destiny.  They made decisions about digital photography that brought them down.  They entered the digital age too little, too late.

Same story when machines replaced the horse and cart. The old and unwilling were left behind.

I read Jack Welch's first book 14 or 15 years ago.  He was pretty proud of his accomplishments.   I read about a failure as a husband and father - he ended up with a girl named "Bunny" as I remember. Trophy wife  I suppose. I wasn't too impressed, as you can tell.

There are still quality tradesmen out there. Just gotta know where to look.


Chilly

[Aunt Phil]

The machine age has been replaced with the information age. It's progress.  Kodak were the masters of their own destiny.  They made decisions about digital photography that brought them down.  They entered the digital age too little, too late.

Same story when machines replaced the horse and cart. The old and unwilling were left behind.

I read Jack Welch's first book 14 or 15 years ago.  He was pretty proud of his accomplishments.   I read about a failure as a husband and father - he ended up with a girl named "Bunny" as I remember. Trophy wife  I suppose. I wasn't too impressed, as you can tell.

There are still quality tradesmen out there. Just gotta know where to look.


Chilly

You might want to revisit your assessment of Kodak Chilly.  Kodak had been the leader from Eastman on under internally raised Mormon management.  In the 80s large institutional owners of Kodak stock decided the company could be more profitable to them by breaking it and selling off the pieces and brought in a new genius from Motorola to do the breaking.  Kodak did not miss digital, Kodak invented most of digital in Rochester, NY.   Kodak also invented & perfected digital Xray, now owned by Johnson & Johnson who are now owned by some holding giant.

LARGE institutional investors killed Kodak, & Bausch & Lomb.  The company that suicided by missing markets was Xerox.

Jack Welch, real beauty he was and is.  He did transition GE from a manufacturing company to a holding company.

The current crop of "tradesmen" sorry Chily, they ain't here.  We have a huge shortage of raw material to even grow tradesmen from.  I'm just glad I retired before the crop of clowns with a plastic box with an ap in their hand came along.  I would have put many chipping hammers through those happy little boxes.

The funny thing is, back in the late 60s, men who worked on the conversion of Kodak Tower to offices swore it would be just a few years until workers leaving the tower would need to plug a device instructing them on how to get it the car and drive home in their ear or they'd stand outside the door letting pigeons crap on them.  We got there with GPS.

The current crop doesn't want to learn or achieve, they just want to know what day their debit card tops up.

[Chillylulu]

I'm with you Phil, but it seems like the same things they said when we were cubs.  I'm just saying that it has been a long time coming and going.  The same holds true on the other side of the screen. Engineers and even computer programmers are totally different than when even I started and I am a generation behind you. 

I've seen a few who get it.  They have to be pretty motivated to find what they need to know.

A decade ago I was complaining all the time and telling the designers / engineers that they were slow. I heard them talking behind my back about it.  We were designing the Colorado convention center (in 3d cad) and I proposed a race. The convention center has these big wings with ceilings over 100' up.  All 4 corners are at a different elevation.  I took the side with 2 ceilings and two different planes.  Their best (the one they picked to race me) had 1 ceiling to lay-out.

We started. After about an hour he came to my office and asked how I was doing, honestly I thought that maybe he was done and that I was wrong.  I told him that I had my heads spotted in the ceiling, the mains and branchlines ranm and that I was piping the goosenecks to the heads. He just looked at my screen, so I asked how he was doing. He said he was still figuring out how to lay out the grid ceiling in 3d.  I told him I would pull off to give him a chance. I waited until the day after  the next and finished my piping plan.  My time was just over 2 hours. His was just over two workdays.

Now they seem to try, and they are almost always respectful. It is better than it was a decade ago.   I think it may be that this last group hired on during a depression. They don't take as much for granted.

I think that quality comes and goes, just like everything else.  The standard seems to lower and never seems to go back up though.

Chilly

Chilly

[Aunt Phil]

Friend of mine worked for a BIG government contractor that does trainloads of Defense work.  They got hot & cold running "engineers" 99.9% of whom know EVERYTHING about nothing.  The "engineers" are backed by "Craftsmen" who wear pull on boots cause they can't lace a pair up.
Most of what they ship is behind schedule and half is incomplete because nobody has any idea how to read the specs, let alone build it.
That is the accepted standard!

The company figured they loose money on every contract, but they make it up in Change Orders, Revisions, and Make it work jobs.  This kid can think, and he can use his hands, so head hunters came after him, and he changed companies.  He spent 6 weeks at the new shop reading books till his Department manager found out he isn't Electrical Engineer #712, he's the kid who can make the light come on and run the generator, and make the Diesel run too. 
She spent an hour looking at his 72 Chevy with a Jake equipped Detroit & 18 speed RoadRanger, and decided she had a valuable employee she needs to keep if for no other reason than to be a translator who protects her from the fools.

This crap ain't new, it evolved from World War II manufacturing and the military.  The reality is the country that had Deming sent him down the road, and built an industrial system based on many people who knew damn little.  We had buildings full of people who moved pages of paper across desks who suddenly became unnecessary when the desktop computer came along, and they went down the road, WITH ATTITUDES. 

Quickest way to set me off is when I hand written instructions to a man who don't know how to do a job, and he tells me he'll only read and learn on company time.  Good luck with that attitude at your new job, cause this one just ended.

Cad systems are magnificent, WHEN THEY WORK.  The computer says it works damn sure ain't pouring concrete or erecting steel yet though, and my hunch is it will be a while till it does.  My last company spent a ton of money helping high school robotics kids build their toys.  We made every dollar back because we had access to the manufacturers of that equipment and our people knew the 411 on robotics.  When we sold the company to the banker backed geniuses with Degrees, and a business plan the bankers loved, the robotics program slipped out the back door to another shop who would and did continue it.  Guess which company survived the economy busting out?

US manufacturing has screwed itself with too many people who can only perform a single job.  The system is failing badly when people sit around waiting for the next instruction rather than shifting to another task when a problem needs to be solved.  I've walked into too many places where the first thing I was told was how many dollars a minute the problem they were waiting for me to solve was costing the company.  Gee, how many dollars an hour are you paying all the clowns who were supposed to prevent the problem and didn't.    Lets not even get into the added costs for all the meetings mandated by Insurance Carriers and Government Agencies. 

We well may have passed the point we can get back from.  I'm fairly sure if a miracle happened tomorrow and Rochester gained 75,000 manufacturing jobs we wouldn't have the electricity to light the shops and run the machinery.