The machine started, handing the part automatically from work station to work station. The cam was washed, its oil cavities were blown out clean, and every machined surface was measured at many different places. The part was magnafluxed, and since it was within allowable tolerances, our machine decreed it to be salvageable.
Those bearings and other surfaces that were worn down or otherwise undersized were MIG welded back up until they were oversized and then ground down precisely to specification. The oil cavities were again blown out clean, the camshaft was pressure washed again, dried, and then lightly oiled for shipment. Finally, it was placed on a storage rack reserved for parts of its type.
And at every step of the line, our machine had worked perfectly, the first time that it had ever operated. Adam had done it again. The VIPs were all excited, and wads of brightly colored Brazilian money changed hands among them. There must have been some hefty bets going.
Then the Brazilians had to play with their new toy themselves, like a bunch of teenagers who had just invented sex.
When they finally ran out of old camshafts to fix, the chairman not only handed me a cashier’s check for the full amount owed on the tool, he also gave me a purchase order for all four of the other new lines that I had quoted them.
I could see now where I was going to get the money to buy the sails for The Brick Royal. Dacron was no longer good enough, and the Kevlar sails that Adam insisted on were going to cost me three times what the hull did. One of those little catches that I had known would be there all along. There would be enough money left over to take Helen on a cruise, or even buy her that new house she’d been hinting about. Not to mention retiring for life, if the mood struck me.
While I stood there with visions of untold wealth dancing before my eyes, Adam publicly hit me up for a new company car. He wanted a big new Chrysler convertible. And with the Brazilian’s check still in my sweaty hand and all of them watching, well, I had to agree to it.
But still they didn’t go home. Adam took them across the alleyway and showed them our boat. I cringed, and stayed behind. I shortly heard a series of loud “BONGs,” and knew that Adam was showing off his ferrocrete again. He’d hand you a big sledge hammer and challenge you to knock a hole in the hull. Nobody could do it, and the hull would ring like a cathedral bell. Remarkable stuff, ferrocrete.
The chairman came back in an hour to tell me that the old engine I had purchased was entirely too inferior for so noble a vessel. He announced that he would be sending us one that was only three years old, that had been rebuilt in his own plant and which incorporated all of the most modern new developments, and complete with transmission, propshaft and propeller. All this as a free gift, in thanks for our excellent workmanship.
Then they all drove over to the Tri-County Airport and hopped a jet for Disneyworld.
SIX
In six weeks, a beautifully rebuilt, late model diesel engine arrived with the freight prepaid. Far more importantly, for the first time in the life of my young company, I could see clear sailing far into the future. With this much business spaced out over two years, I could afford to pick and choose among the other work I took on, with no more dangerous underbidding just to keep my people busy. Also, I was now flush enough so that I didn’t have to go begging to the bank for every machine I built.
You see, nobody builds a machine more complicated than a hammer completely by himself. For example, almost every machine bigger than a hand tool has a programmable controller, a small computer, to run it. These are built by companies like Allen-Bradley or Westinghouse, who have spent years and megabucks developing them. It would be absolutely absurd for a tool builder to try and make one of his own unless he was designing a standard machine that he figured he could sell a few thousand copies of. Furthermore, the customer wouldn’t want anything that they couldn’t buy a replacement for in a hurry. Machines break down, and down time is deadly expensive. The same goes for bearings, motors, hydraulic parts, drives, spindles, cutters, gears, belts and the thousands of other things that go into a machine tool. Often, more than half the selling price of a tool is spent on purchased parts and assemblies.
Thus, to build a machine, you must not only pay your people’s salaries and benefits, as well as your overhead, you must also lay out a very substantial slug of cash for purchased parts. This makes you a slave to the bankers, a bland, polished and thoroughly despicable brand of quasihumanity. But now I was free, free at last, or so I thought.
I told Helen that from then on, I would be spending a lot more time with her, and asked her to pick out a cruise that we could go on together, sort of like a second honeymoon. I was sure that our relationship was on the upswing.
I was then contacted again by the Brazilians, who had yet another profitable order for me, and also a desperate request to speed up the previously agreed on delivery schedule. They offered some nice bonuses for it, but they wanted all of their machines delivered by yesterday, if not the day before.
Well, you try to keep your customers satisfied. We went over our schedules, and by building all of the lines in parallel rather than sequentially, by not accepting any other new work, by temporarily renting more factory space, by hiring a lot more new people, by farming out a lot of the parts to my friendly competitors, and by floating a bodacious loan with the bank, we could get all of their work out in six months.
Of course, I wouldn’t be likely to get home much during that time, but I thought that my wife was used to that sort of thing by now. Even so, I spent a whole evening with her explaining exactly why I was doing what I was doing, and how it would be so much better for us in the future.
So for six months, it was “interesting times,” as they say the Chinese say, but the work got done. Sometimes I hardly got home from one week to the next, and when I did, I found that Helen usually didn’t want to talk to me. She preferred screaming. We got into a fight damn near every time I got home, which sure took the incentive out of getting there in the first place.
Building the machines in parallel instead of in series was more work than we had thought it would be. Normally, the engineers and designers would have designed the first machine, and then started in on the second while the controls designers and the mechanical checkers were doing their thing on the first. By the time the mechanical designers were working on machine number six, the controls people would be on number five, the machinists would be building the parts on number four, the purchasing people would be getting in the purchased parts on number three, the assemblers would be putting number two together in Assembly Bay A, and the electricians and the pipe fitters would be working on machine number one in Assembly Bay B. That is to say, a production line, of sorts, would be in operation.
As it was, everything had to be designed at first and at once, at a time when the electricians and Bridgeport operators had nothing to do. Despite the different names that various skilled workers had, the truth is that specialization is for insects, and good people can do anything they put their mind to. Working outside his usual trade is good for a worker, it’s broadening, and a lot of our people volunteered for strange jobs. We had electricians designing controls and machinists designing what they usually build. In a few months, the engineers would be working with milling machines and arc welders.
And they were all having fun, doing unusual things, but of course they weren’t as efficient as someone who had been doing it for years. Costs were going way up, and worse, serious mistakes were occasionally made. Some things had to be done twice and even three times, and still weren’t being done as well as we usually did things.
On top of it all, we were working in four buildings scattered around the city, and an ungodly number of man-hours were being wasted just running between them.
Coordinating all of this was a major headache, and I spent long hours at my desk. Somewhere through all of this, late one night, I must have confused a process server with one of the runners who were circulating between our various shops. As best as I was able to figure out much later, I must have just said that yes, I was me, and thrown what he handed me into the “IN” basket.