I was working at the huge General Motors assembly plant in Baltimore, Maryland, during the 1980s. My normal assignment was in the “body shop,” where I worked with a team of technicians who repaired the various pipes, hoses, and tubing throughout the department where the truck chassis and body were welded together. Our most common call was to repair broken air hoses that fed the air-powered tools used on the assembly line, but we repaired a wide range of equipment, including the hydraulic systems on assembly line robots, pumps that applied sealant and glue, and pneumatic systems that controlled the movement of automated welders.
From time to time, one of us might be moved to another part of the plant to fill in for someone on vacation, or for project work, such as the installation of new equipment. In early April, I was sent to the final assembly area for training. This is where the floor mats and other interior parts were installed on the Chevy and GMC vans assembled in the plant. I was to receive training on the repair of the high-pressure water jet cutter that shot water at 60,000 pounds per square inch to blast holes in the floor carpets where seat bolts and other assemblies were attached.
I was replacing Nelson Grabowski, who was on sick leave. Nelson was scheduled to return to work in five weeks. I was to learn all about the water jet cutting machine in three days of instruction and then take over the job until Nelson returned. As it turned out, there was actually very little to learn about the machine. Most of the controls were electronic, so the electricians took care of them. The only tricky part of the job was learning how to rebuild the multiplier cylinder that took in water from the tap and compressed it to the point that it could cut through the carpets (or anything else that got in the way). There was some complexity involved in rebuilding the multiplier cylinder but once I learned how to do that, the rest of the job was routine.
I learned that the cylinders usually had a life of about one ten-hour shift, but sometimes two pumps would fail on a single shift. We always had five or six spare cylinders available and plenty of spare parts to rebuild them. The protocol called for the technician to rebuild bad cylinders as soon as they were removed from the water jet cutting machine, but I soon learned that the technician on the day shift would just dump the bad cylinders on the table in the rebuild room and leave them for me on the afternoon shift for rebuilding.
Other people might have felt taken advantage of, but I was only going to be doing this job for five weeks and even with doing most of the rebuild work for both shifts, I still had plenty of free time. In addition, I had a nice little room that was clean and quiet to hang out and read if I wanted to and if the water cutter was running, my foreman didn’t bother me. There was a small fridge in the rebuild room where my coworkers kept their lunch boxes and there was a coffee pot, so people were often stopping by to chat or have a coffee.
Nelson’s five-week medical leave turned into five months, and I continued to cover for him. Then one week I was told that I had to come in on the day shift for three days to take some mandatory safety training. I alerted Jimmy Harrison who worked in the rebuild room on day shift that I was not going to be rebuilding any cylinders the upcoming Monday through Wednesday. I emphasized that if he just dumped the bad cylinders on the table, he wouldn’t have any spares when he needed them. He said he understood and would rebuild all the bad cylinders as soon as he removed them from the water jet cutter.
When I came in for training on Monday, I saw a stack of rebuilt cylinders in the rebuild room, so it seemed like Jimmy was keeping up his part of the deal. Checking again on Tuesday, the rebuild room had a good supply of repaired cylinders, so it seemed like everything was under control.
On Wednesday, I had just completed the first session of my assigned safety training for the day when Jimmy came running into the classroom. He was red in the face and quickly blurted out that the final assembly line was about to go down because the water jet cutter was not working. All the cylinders that he had rebuilt were bad and he had used the last one that I had rebuilt.
Apparently, it had been so long since Jimmy had rebuilt a cylinder, that he didn’t remember how to do it correctly. He wanted to know if I could help him rebuild a cylinder and install it. He knew it was going to take 30 minutes or more but there didn’t seem like any other option. The plant lost $10,000.00 each minute the assembly line was down so this was going to become a very high-profile problem in just a few minutes.
I always worried that I was going to arrive at work one day and find the water jet cutter down and all cylinders broken so I kept a spare cylinder inside my locked toolbox. I trotted down to the rebuild room with Jimmy and when I opened the toolbox and handed him the spare cylinder, he broke out in an ear-to-ear smile.
We ran over to the water jet cutter, quickly replaced the cylinder, started up the machine and watched as a few seconds later, the main assembly line started accepting carpets again. It had been down for maybe a minute. Moments later a handful of managers arrived on their electric carts. Once they saw the line running, they were happy, and they scurried back off to their offices. And Jimmy never had to explain why we didn’t have any spare cylinders for the water jet cutter.
After we got the water jet cutter working again, we walked over to the rebuild room and took apart one of the cylinders that Jimmy had “repaired.” I quickly realized that he had failed to install one of the two large o-rings that sealed the main shaft. One o-ring fit in a slot on the outside of the shaft but a second o-ring, which Jimmy omitted, had to be pushed under the collar at the end of the main shaft. He didn’t remember that an o-ring was hidden there, so while he replaced all the other parts on the cylinder, he left the old leaking o-ring under the collar.
Apparently, this experience taught Jimmy a lesson because after this he rebuilt all the cylinders that failed on his shift and never left broken cylinders for me in the rebuild room again.
