Quote:
Originally Posted by srvy
Working in the elements my whole life I always liked winter over summer. You can always put more clothes on if your cold but when its hot you just stay hot.
I always felt for those folks who worked at Owens Corning Fiberglass in Fairfax Ks. I used to have to go in the once a month to monitor elevations on fan motor bases and column pads supporting the ovens. It was always hot in there summer and winter Think glass blowers shop in branson or a blacksmith shop. We would have one location under the main oven we would have to get readings on 12 columns. It took about 10 minutes it was so hot your heart raced and you could feel every pump. It was actually hard to think straight and if you touch the steel on the column it would burn. They actually had a rule that work under the oven could only go for 10 minute interval then you had to come out and into an air conditioned hut on the outside. We would come out pouring sweat and shirt and jeans soaked hitting the ac actually made you feel worse as you got sluggish and cold shivers. It was double overtime so we volunteered but that was the worst.
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Back during college, I worked summers at Johns Manville fiberglass insulation plant in McPherson, KS. It was 12hr shift work, which sucked. But the pay was incredible and I lived in my parent's basement at the time so I made tons of money for a college kid.
They would take glass balls about the size of a golf ball, and melt them in a giant oven and blow string sized threads of glass into a big 16 foot wide mat, which would then be cut into whichever insulation was being made. Every six months, we had to do what's called an oven cleanout. Where we had to get inside the ovens and scrape off the layer of baked insulation from the sides of the oven walls and ducts with a little pneumatic hand chisel. They couldn't completely shut down the entire oven, so it was still very hot. We had to get bundled up in what was basically a hazmat suit, and duct tape around our hands and feet, and wear a respirator and crawl inside this thing and chisel the walls. The worst was cleaning out the ducts that ran to the filtration units, because the ducts were about the dimensions of a coffin, and they'd shove you in and you'd be working with your arms out in front of you and you couldn't turn around. And they'd occasionally pull you out and make sure you were ok, and shove you back in by your feet. It was easily the most physically demanding thing I've ever done. They only let us stay inside for 15 minutes at a time, and you got out and stripped down and you were just drenched in sweat. They'd make you drink a specific amount of water before you could work again. It was hell.