The company had a plan for me, I just wasn’t aware of it yet. After several weeks in the J&L Co-op department, I was reassigned up to sub-assembly. There I worked with seasoned mechanics learning the makings of headstock input shafts, clutches and shifting mechanisms, among other things. The company was sending me around to various departments, and exposing me to much. Pretty overwhelming at times, and of course you (hopefully) learn to get along with diverse personalities. Not everyone was thrilled with wet-nursing a newly graduated college student, whos hands-on experience was lacking. But I got along well with the people in sub-assembly, a vital link in the finished product. This was where the major pieces of a machine tool were created, headstocks, tailstocks, tool slides, hydraulic power units. Then these units were placed on skids and sent to final assembly.

After a stint in sub-assembly, I was moved into final assembly, where the various pieces came together. At that time, the electrical portion of the machine was grafted on. That part of the process was foreign to me, as I was trained in the mechanical arts. The final assembly mechanics where quite skeptical of me, and rightly so; I just basically stood around and did a lot of observing, trying not to mess up too bad. I remember a particular mechanic I was assigned to, a gruff old veteran who didn’t have much to say. Being new at the game, I was always wondering what I did to upset him; much later I found out that was just his demeanor. His job came after the machine was “powered up”, or operable. He placed a boring bar in the headstock spindle chuck, and bored and faced all the turret faces. I do remember one time he went off to “have a smoke”, leaving me at the machine. The boring bar was in place, but he had failed to shut the slide feed off; the set screws that held the cutting bit were high enough that they cut a perfect keyway in a turret bore. Not good. “Why didn’t you stop it?” he asked. I didn’t have an answer, I had no idea at that time on how to use the machine operators panel, which button to push? The feed was so slow, I didn’t notice it was even moving. They put me with another mechanic…………..

Not all of my trials were negative; but it was to be expected with a lack of experience. The company knew this and shifted me from job to job. They hired me as an engineer, and this background training would be invaluable in my (and the companys) future. One thing was for sure, I got my hands dirty. Being the new hire, I was “requested” to do many menial tasks, and soon learned that every job in the shop was necessary, and the people who did those jobs were equally important. Working on the assembly floor, I developed a habit of observing, asking questions, and listening to the response.

As one of my professors said, “you don’t learn by talking, only by listening.”