I graduated high school in 1968 and worked a “summer internship” at IBM in Huntsville, Alabama. My job was to be a “student machinist” at the IBM model shop at IBM’s facility that was responsible for the Saturn V instrument units(IUs). IBM was the prime contractor and coordinated the subcontractors making parts for the IUs. Two parts, the command decoder and a transponder were made by Space Craft Incorporated (later SCI, Inc as they morphed into a contract manufacturer). My dad was engineering liaison between IBM and SCI for these two devices and had to see their design and manufacturer through to meet IBM and NASA standards while helping SCI solve problems along the way.
That was one of the most amazing jobs I ever had. They had to chase me out at the end of each day. I eagerly learned how to operate the machines and build things. I also did a bunch of experiments with helicoils to help the shop manager document failures to get more leverage with a vendor. Helicoils are coils made of very hard metal that fit into a threaded hole in a softer material like aluminum to allow fasteners to be torqued to a much higher degree than aluminum thread could support.
There was another high school graduate in the shop for a period of time. I’ll never forget when he and I lifted one of the flight computers off a cart and onto a bench and just as we were lifting it the NASA inspector said “Careful, that’s worth X million dollars.” I don’t remember X. I just remembered the other guy didn’t last. I barely perceived his departure. He no doubt transferred to a better personal fit. If there was any hint of competition he perceived, well it wasn’t a fair match. My parents had spent all my life preparing me for that job. But I was oblivious, ignoring him completely except for the occasional amenity if we met. But I was head down on the work all the time on the clock.
The staff in the shop let me do just about anything within reason. I learned to carefully clamp sheet metal down before cutting it by having a too loose part slip and zap my finger (minor cut, but it was the same one a dog and a piece of glass had scarred in previous years). I was allowed to do alodine treatment of metal parts in large (fast food fryer size) open metal containers of chemicals. I spilled about a pint of methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) on a floor made of soluble tiles and gave an area of tiles a highly customized appearance. How it was that I didn’t get punished for that is simply amazing. The smell of the MEK as I cleaned the floor never left me and to this day I have to immediately escape any chemical that smells like it. Can the readers guess that this was years before OSHA standards?
But my all time record foul up was when I built a few very complex panels for an engineer’s project. The panels were designed to hold a large number of switches and indicators. They were 1/8″ aluminum, the standard rack 19″ width and perhaps 18 inches tall. I programmed a Computer Numerical Control (CNC: think “programmable”) machine to drill the holes after I’d used a mill with a stack of the aluminum sheets to cut the rectangular holes. But I’d mis-programmed the machine and the holes were drilled with a mirror image error. I have no harsh memory of the upset that caused me. I think this was down to the very matter of fact, low key reaction of the machinists and management I worked with to correct the problem. There were some controlled “OH SHIT!” type exclamations though, but I was a Christian at the time and probably didn’t swear .
Because of the investment of time doing the milling and the schedule for the work, starting over was not a choice. I had to get the holes welded shut and then I used a device to grind the metal back down to a smooth surface. This would have been a wonderful solution except that the welding slightly warped the panels and they were no longer dead flat, they were “close to flat”. But I fixed the CNC programming error and drilled the correct holes, got the parts inspected and turned in. But I was allowed to declare victory with this while all of us knew the engineer might be pissed off by the warpage. Hmm, perhaps they told him “this was made by an 18 year old with two month’s experience.” Nah, it was probably more like “this was made by a kid who didn’t know what he was doing: what would you expect?”
I was allowed to fail in that job without it being an overblown tragedy. I don’t know why in later years I developed extreme fears of both failure and success. Luckily I seem to have reached a stage of my life where I can once again hold the same perspective as I held in that machine shop. I think part of it is that most of what I do these days I’ve already done six ways to Sunday and if I haven’t, my workmate Nick Edgington has done it with great expertise and so there is nothing much to fret about.
I left IBM at the end of the summer to start engineering studies at Auburn University. But had my circumstances been different I could well imagine becoming a fully trained machinist and working my way up to master machinist. The master of the IBM shop was a slightly grumpy old guy. It took me a long time to gain his respect but he eventually warmed up to me and taught me what mastery of the equipment could produce such as a couple of sine blocks that had mind-boggling precision. Sine blocks are a pair of triangular shaped blocks where one slides over the other and the top one presents a dead flat surface an easy to calculate distance from the machine table the blocks are fastened to.
One day some new machines came in from Germany. Each machinist was assigned one of the machines to study and become proficient with and to be able to teach the other machinists about its details. After a while there came a day on which demonstrations and remarks about each machine would be provided by their assigned machinists. One guy had the really huge new mill. The table was roughly three feet wide and 12 feet long. He had a solid block of aluminum perhaps eight inches on a side fastened to the table. He had a mill cutter that was about two inches in diameter in place. He started the table moving and the block of aluminum approached the mill cutter fast. Some of the machinists backed up a few steps and I followed their lead. When the aluminum reached the cutter there was a stream of aluminum emulating a snow blower by shooting up and away from the block and toward the ceiling. The cut only lasted a second or two but was etched in my memory.
I still have a copy of the helicoil report and nothing but fond memories of that job and the men and I worked with. My favorite was a guy named Hamerschmit. Hamerschmit told me a story about shoving the throttle on an F104 he was moving from one building to another. He broke rules shoving the throttle but had the further problem when he yanked the throttle back of needing to go to the locker room for new underwear. I never forgot the imagined thrill of that experience and dreamed of experiencing it. I got close decades later when I gassed my Yamaha R6 motorcycle (about five pounds per horsepower).
But my proudest achievement was making adapter plates for the IU to compensate for a design change in the mounting of a device to the inside of the unit’s ring.. The plates were vaguely four by eight inches and 1/2 inch aluminum with several helicoils. I kept an extra one but it ended up being a door counterweight in the psychology lab I worked in and I never fetched it back. But something about those simple objects going into space gave me a quiet pride. And the notion that one of the IUs was crashed into the moon as part of a seismic study makes me imagine one of that one plate lying in or near the crater the collision created. It will probably be there be there for a long time.