Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Jerry
So its ham instead of spam for Christmas

well done ( for them I mean we all know you are worth it)

Well, thursday is my last day. Merry X-mas to me!

-Jerry

Finally working again. Got a hob as a maintenance mechanic at Pacific Nutritional Foods. http://www.morinu.com/pnf/

It is mostly owned by Morinaga out of Japan and we make the Morinaga line of packaged tofu and soy milk as well as co-package for other companies. The tofu is also sold under the Yutaka brand name in the UK and europe.

It is swing shift and the pay is not so great, took a 30% cut from laika but it is better than unemployment.

Yeah I took a contract that allows me to telecommute with a firm in California.
Had to dust off my Linux admin skills, the pay per hour is pretty good, and the term is for a few months anyway.
I am really tired of the IT world however, The stress level is fairly high and the demands are pretty great.
It is really a young mans game and most don't want to pay for your skills.

I really want to just retire, but I am over 2 years from Social Security and about 5 years from Medicare which is the costly damn hold up, no pun intended.
I really want to see hold Obama care shakes out.
Social Security will be enough to cover the monthly nut with some to spare if we live fairly frugally.
Thank goodness I don't have only that to survive on!

Done with PNF. Probably the least well equipped shop ever. No lathe or mill so people had to whittle stuff out with hack saws or the little plasma cutter. The plant engineer has a strangle hold on the plant and virtually runs the place. The problem is he keeps so much close to his chest that we could hardly do anything without going through him, and then some times he wouldn't give you the info we needed to diagnose a problem.

For example the have a capper that puts the cap on tetra pack aseptic product containers. It puts a ring of glue around the perimeter of the cap and then a dot of glue in the center for the pull tab, it then places the cap on the container. Normal practice anywhere else is they take a dozen containers every half hour and test for leaks by pulling the tabs. putting the cap on, and then laying them on their side to see if it leaks around the perimeter. This takes a guy a few minutes every half hour or so.

In an effort to reduce this "wasted labor" He set up a Keyence machine vision system to take a picture of the glue ring and center dot and shut down the machine if something happens. Sounds good, right. Well, the darn thing shuts down for just about anything including perfectly good glue rings. The screen shows the image of the failed cap and the boundaries failed but with no real info when it does. I asked the plant engineer who set the thing up how he has it programmed to pass/fail. He wont say, worse he tells us to ignore the screen and the camera is not the problems. Yeah, right. I can see it failing perfectly good caps but passing caps that dont have even a full ring. What a joke. The camera system probably cost over $10k and every time the machine is down while we are trying to make the camera happy it is something like $1750 an hour for wages utilities down the drain.

But I dont have to deal with that anymore. Three weeks ago I was offered a Maintenance Tech position at Davis Tool, a huge machine shop locally. $3 an hour raise, days, climate controlled shop (PNF gets over 100F in the summer inside), and 6 miles from home (PNF 15 Miles). The plant engineer at PNF told me he could beat what they were offering but in the end only matched what Davis Tool offered. I honestly believe he was offended that I didnt take him up on his offer.

So last Monday was my first day. Pretty neat place. Does everything but caters mostly to the aerospace industry. It is big, 2 floors at 110k sq ft each. VMCs, Dual spindle HMCs, EDM, grinding, lapping, honing, 4.4kw laser cutter, cnc punches, welding, press brakes, anodizing, painting powder coating. Machinery downstairs and assembly and powder coat upstairs. Some real big machines, mostly Japanese, especially Makino. There is a massive Mazak Integrex e-series. A new machine was dropped off the other day. Cant remember what brand or model but it does have a 105HP, 30krpm spindle! I wish I could take pics but due to the sensitive nature of some of the jobs I cant. I am doing a time lapse of the installation of the new machine so hopefully I can post that.

So this ought to be more interesting than making tofu. Still not as good pay as I was getting at laika, but I got to take what I can get. I only managed to get a handful of interviews the entire time I was out of work. I even got flown up to see the Machine shop at Valve Software but that didnt pan out. Too bad, I would have loved to go up there.

Sounds like a much better deal all around.