Neanderpundit

is an oxyfuel welding/cutting setup.

The green (Oxygen) tank is an S, and weighs about 75 lbs empty, the black and yellow (Acetylene) tank is a WC and weighs about 90 lbs (Empty or full, the acetylene is dissolved in acetone so it doesn’t explode, and the acetone is most of the weight of the cylinder)

These tanks are ubiquitous at the steel mills, and as often as not they would have to be lugged to location. At the ripe old age of 18, as a millwrights apprentice, this task often fell to me.

There were carts, for sure, but most guys would just sling the cylinder up over their shoulder and start walking- most of the time, the roads were so bad, or the terrain so horrible, that a cart was worthless. And there were often stairs.

I was a big kid, and while I was chunky there was a lot of meat there too, so, damned if I was gonna let anyone show me up, I carried.

For the better part of four years, it seems, I ended up lugging an oxygen and an acetylene cylinder to some remote damned location to heat or burn or braze something, and I did so just throwing it over my shoulder. I can still do it with a pretty substantial weight. What Professor Hale alludes to in comments in the post previous to this one is very true; while we did have women on the job- many of them- they fell into two categories- women physically capable of doing the work but without the aptitude, and women with the aptitude that were just too small. When I was an oiler, I worked with one black woman, Kathleen, who was a great oiler- was great at topping off fluids and making sure stuff stayed greased, and that was great, she did her job proudly and well. I had to carry the grease gun and etc because she simply lacked the physical strength. And we had another girl, who had gotten her journeyman’s card by virtue of being able to break the neck of anyone she wanted, but who could not understand why some screwdrivers were “Plus shaped” and others “minus shaped” Now, there are and were men who fit these categories as well, but if you wanted someone to could carry the 160 lbs of gas bottles up 100 feet of rusty stair and once there change a 300 lb roller and tune and train a 1500 foot long conveyor belt, you got a guy. Everyone knew that and never questioned it. I don’t know if that has changed. I don’t really care. I know the women there were paid the same as the men despite flat out not being able to do the job, and that was thirty years ago. Everyone got paid the same.

Aside: the smallest acetylene cylinder is an MC. Know what the MC stands for? Motorcycle. Motorcycle headlights used to burn acetylene, and the small tanks were made for motorcycles.

both recreationally and as a result of making bad decisions. This is an activity to avoid if possible.

I have also been shocked under several circumstances- the earliest one, repairing the socket end of an extension cord without the presence of mind to have unplugged the plug end first. I was seven. I figured it out pretty quickly.

When I was taking my apprenticeship at Inland one of the things that required constant maintenance were the rail shoes. On each pusher car or larry car or hopper there were two rails that delivered DC power to the equipment. The current draw was merely immense.

The rails were on big steel braces and were insulated from the steel with thick fiber pads. The equipment, which moved up and down on heavy rails of their own, received power from the hot rails by large insulating wooden arms with copper shoes on the end, that were held in place by gravity. The shoes had cables as thick as a man’s wrist, and they went into the bowels of the machine to drive the equipment. The insulating beams were pine, about six inches square and six or eight feet long.

Most of the time this stuff had to be worked hot. You could not shut down to work on anything short of a disaster, so we just had guys who were good at hotwork. To replace the hot shoes we had to have two millwrights and two electricians, and on one day Tiny and I were the millwrights, he the master and I the apprentice, and Charlie and Randy the electricians, Charlie the master and Randy the apprentice.

Charlie had disconnected the power at the copper track shoes and Tiny and I were going to yank them off (They wore through pretty rapidly) and replace the shoes and one of the wooden beams, when Randy walked over and casually leaned on the still hot rail.

We screamed in unison but it was already to late to stop him- Tiny grabbed up a piece of 6×6 in his giant hands and threw it like a javelin at Randy, hitting him ion the chest and knocking him free of the rail. He lie on the ground a bit, smoke coming from his damp clothes and his drawers freshly loaded. He did get up. It hosed his motor functions for a lot of the rest of the day, but he survived.

I saw a powerful lot of people almost die at the mill, and I did see several people die. it is nice to have a memory of someone who survived.