We drove east for a few miles down the road to the Hayden power generation plant, where the gate guard was expecting us. He directed us to the parking lot and explained that the Plant manager’s office was on the top floor, and he was waiting to meet me.
He rose and came over to introduce himself and ask if my wife was with me. I told him “Yes, she’s out in the car.”
He said, “Go back out and bring her in. I need to talk to her, too. We don’t have much trouble with the guys leaving, because they like the hunting, hiking and fishing, but we lose more men to unhappy wives than anything else.”
I went back out to the car and got Carolyn, and he introduced himself again to her. His name was Wayne Butz, and I remember thinking with that name he would be angry all his life, or have a great sense of humor.
I never met a jollier man. After we sat down he went over my experience and qualifications. Then he came to my test scores. He frowned a little, then smiled a little as he asked, “Are you sure you’re not here for my job?”
I laughed and reassured him I came for the Maintenance Machinist job. Not interested in sitting behind a desk at all.
He explained that because this was a union company, there were procedures that had to be followed. The job was posted to all the other power plants in the company for ten days, to allow any other machinists in the company to bid on the position first. After the internal bidding process was over, I was first in line for whichever power plant needed me.
This was not what I was expecting, but I was glad to find that it was a union job. More than the higher pay and benefits, having a contract spelling out what is expected of the employee and what is expected of the company takes a lot of the worry out of the work.
I got the phone number to call, and told him I would keep in touch and I hoped to see him in a couple of weeks.
Carolyn and I were just about out of money, so we filled up the little Toyota and carefully drove to Oklahoma, where Carolyn’s family lived. Our daughter Darlene was staying down there and was not with us during the month of homelessness, living in a tent in park campgrounds.
We arrived at Carolyn’s mother’s home in Durant and had a glad reunion with our daughter there. Then all three of us were invited to travel back towards Colorado to Carolyn’s brother Larry’s home near the Air Force Base in Altus. I don’t know what we would have done without the help of family. They not only fed us, but loaned us some money for gas back to the job.
I was pretty sure I had the job nailed down, but I called every couple of days so they wouldn’t forget me.
On day eleven I drove up to the Colorado-Ute Electric Ass’n headquarters in Montrose and asked if the job was mine yet. They laughed and told me they were going to have to give me the job so I’d quit calling!
Then they explained that the machinist from the Nucla power plant had bid on the job in Hayden and would I be interested in a job at the Nucla Station. I had never been there, but I said sure, so they arranged for me to interview in Nucla the next day.
We didn’t have enough money left for a motel room, so we camped out near a stream on the Uncompahgre Range between Montrose and Nucla. Darlene remembers putting the sodas in the stream to cool that evening, and also remembers that the next morning when I cooked some Vienna sausages over the campfire for breakfast, Carolyn got sick and they came back up. From that day until the day she died, she never ate a Vienna sausage again.
We had no doubts now she was pregnant. She soon got over the morning sickness and was ecstatic to be carrying a baby at last.
At the power plant I was greeted warmly and given a tour of the facility, and especially the machine shop. It was fairly complete, except for the lack of a milling machine. When working in remote towns, parts to be machined can’t be shipped hundreds of miles away for work, so I resolved that if worse came to worse, I could cut a keyway on the lathe, with some adapting.
They all knew my name before I was introduced. We soon found out that in small towns, word gets around fast. Not many new people move in and we were the biggest news of the year, I think.
We went into the little town wondering how we were going to find a place to live. There was no daily newspaper, so no want ads were available, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.
On a hunch, we stopped at the little laundromat downtown and sure enough, there was a bulletin board inside. I found a note listing a two bedroom house to be rented. “Inquire at the barbershop” it said. Well, the barbershop is just across the street, so that was easy.
I entered the barbershop and asked the barber about the house for rent. He asked if I was the new machinist at the power plant. Like I said, word gets around fast in a small town.
After I said yes, and introduced myself, he apologized and explained he was just finishing a new house for his family, but they were still living in the rental house for a couple of weeks yet. He had just posted the note on the laundry room wall that morning.
He proposed we could share the house for a couple of weeks rent free, if that would be OK. We could come back that evening and meet his family after work. Wonderful! I quickly agreed, as that solved the problem of finding the first month’s rent up front.
When I reported for work the first day, The supervisor and manager both talked about my experience and capabilities. I was much younger than the former machinist, and they had some doubts I could handle the requirements of the job. That suited me just fine, as I would rather be judged on my abilities rather than some certification or degree.
The plant was small, and the maintenance team had one welder, one machinist, one electrician, and one mechanic. So being able to do the work was essential because there was no backup.
Of course, I got plenty of teasing by the rest of the crew. Every time I started working on some machine, somebody would say, “That’s not the way Tillman did it!”
At first I would ask, “Who is Tillman?”
Later I replied, “Well, he must have not done it right, or I wouldn’t have to be doing it again.”
Eventually, after a few weeks of seeing my skills, they started asking me for advice sometimes. One day the welder and the mechanic came in to the shop and asked if I could help them remove a cast iron sprocket on the traveling chain screens out at the river. It was rusted hard to the shaft, worn out and needing replacement.
After I looked at it, I said I thought I could remove it in ten or fifteen minutes. They said, “Bullshit! We have been using pullers, and heating it with torches, and beating it with hammers for over two hours, and it’s stuck tight!”
I went to the shop, put a big cold chisel in my pocket, and got a sharp 1/4 inch drill bit and the drill motor. While they watched, I started drilling a line of small holes, starting just above the keyway, on a radius out to one side. After the first hole I could tell the iron was fairly soft, so I said, “Ten minutes, no problem.” When I drilled the last hole near the teeth on the outside, they asked if I was ready for the puller.
I said, “No, I’m pulling this off by hand”. They laughed again, until I took the cold chisel out of my pocket, picked up a hammer nearby, and hit it hard just once into the line of holes I had drilled. As I knew it would, the sprocket split to the key and expanded just enough for me reach up and slide it off the shaft by hand.
I just smiled and said, “Call me anytime!” as I handed them the sprocket.
Years of experience is worth more than any amount of book studies. I knew that trick because I had done it many times before. When I was just a boy I remember watching my grandfather remove a timing gear from the camshaft on an old Chevrolet the same way.
I’m not opposed to studying the books. I collected a stack of books through the years - mostly reference books, and I used them when necessary.
For instance, I had to install seal sleeves in the end housings of boiler feed pumps. They are an interference fit, and cannot be pushed in without damage. Early in my machinist training, I looked up the coefficient of expansion of iron and steel, and using my trusty slide rule, calculated a handy rule of thumb for chilling or heating those parts so they would slide right into place.
On any round part, whether sleeve or bushing or throttle valve seats on a turbine, the numbers to know is 1/2 thousandths inch change per 100º F. per inch of diameter. If a bushing is .004” bigger than the bore in the housing, and the bushing is 7 inches in diameter, then putting the bushing in liquid nitrogen will chill it to about -350º F. That will shrink it 3.5 x 7 / 2 = .012.2” At that temperature it will rattle right into the hole and then expand tightly in about a minute.
Of course, since the nitrogen is so cold, insulated gloves, face shields and other protective gear is required. Care is also needed because the steel part will be brittle and must be handled gently. Every time I did this in the shop, people would come to watch and play. An apple at that temperature will shatter like glass if dropped on the floor.
That formula works the same whether heating or cooling. When putting a bearing or sleeve on a shaft, the expansion is the same.
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