My new position as the “Tooling Guy” was quite a change for me. Back in the grinder engineering group I was doing layout and design work on customers orders. My new position did not require any real creative work, which I missed. But that would come in due time. There were only so many turning and boring tools to document and catalog, and when that was done, I slowly became involved in various lathe related projects. Most of my early exposure consisted of helping some of the veteran designers with small pieces of their jobs. I slowly became familiar with the build structure of a lathe, its various sub-assemblies, and how everything came together on the assembly floor.

One of the best ways to learn about the structure of a machine is to study the machine manual that we provided to our customers. This book had all the major sub-assemblies shown in exploded views, all the parts being numbered and keyed to a parts list. These manuals were forever out of date, because improvements were being made all the time. But the ability to visualize how things went together was important to me. J&L had a separate group of people who created the manuals and kept them updated, both electrical, mechanical and programming. (they were located on the top floor of the Technical Center). A fella by the name of Bill Wilson headed up the group. The drawings in these manuals were all done by hand, using an outside firm from Massachusetts. I remember one of these guys walking around on the assembly floor, observing the machinery. He had a sketch board and straightedge, and would rough sketch up various items. This was before any computer drafting capabilities were generally available. Today it would be quite easy to create an exploded view from AutoCAD assembly drawings, using the computer. I’m sure J&L paid a good price for the artwork in those early manuals.

As I have mentioned before, J&L had a great cafeteria, located halfway down Plant #1. It was always crowded at lunchtime. But they also had hand pushed “lunchcarts”, which appeared on the shop floor every day, mid-morning. I think there were two or three of these around various areas of the shop, and they sold coffee and other drinks, donuts and sandwiches. The rule was you were not to “chase the cart”, but wait for it to appear in your area. Because the Engineering Office was the last stop, a lot of the “good stuff” was gone by then. So it only made sense to somehow happen to be on the assembly floor when it appeared there. This was SOP (standard operating procedure) for many. Occasionally you might even see your boss at the cart at that time (“hey, boss, fancy meeting you here…………”).

The lunchcart that came up into engineering was piloted by a good-natured woman, who decided she had a crush on one of the older engineers. But Sam, the engineer, wanted nothing to do with her. He tried to be absent whenever she appeared, but sometimes he got caught. She would go into a high-pitched squeal of delight when she saw him, “Sammy, Sammy, Sammy”………….as Sam ran for his life…………