Challenging Carpentry Work
By OldMack © August 24, 2011
When I began working for Granite-Yamanishi, a joint venture general contracting company in San Francisco, they had already completed blasting and excavating the hole in which a waste water treatment plant was to be constructed completely underground near Fisherman’s Warf. And the iron-workers had already installed the interlocking steel plates of the cofferdam on the walls of the seventy-five feet in diameter hole to prevent cave-ins and they were laying the re-bar steel in the bottom of the hole, seventy feet below the level of San Francisco Bay, which would reinforce the ten-foot thick foundation slab when the concrete was dumped into it. In other words it looked like an interesting job to me.
We had driven to the City in our converted 1958 Ford bread delivery van from Florida, but we knew we couldn’t live in it as the only Recreational Vehicle parking place was already filled with Winnebagos and converted Greyhound buses. So we rented the converted-garage apartment of a house in the south end of the Mission District on Chicago Way and parked the van at the curb.
Chris enrolled A.J. in the Guadalupe Elementary School and then signed on as volunteer Teacher’s Aide. Every morning they would walk up the hill to the school, while I walked to the terminus of the Mission Streetcar line to commute to work in the hole.
In the evenings, while Chris tutored A.J. in reading, spelling and arithmetic to give her the jump on her peers, or walked with her to the park to play on the jungle gym, I pulled the engine out of our truck and gutted its interior.
The head of an engine re-manufacturing company in Oakland lived in our neighborhood. He came by while I was maneuvering the old engine out of the truck and onto the sidewalk. Before going home, he had convinced me that a factory re-build of the 223 cubic-inch, six-cylinder engine would be faster, better and cheaper than if I were to do it myself, as I had planned. The following morning we loaded the engine in the back of his pickup and off he and it went. Had I rebuilt the engine myself, I’d have had to send out the block to be re-bored and its crankshaft turned. If Bob Caswell were still living he would have been the guy I’d trust with the machine work, but Bob was gone by then and I knew of no other precision machinists in the City whom I’d trust with that vital part of the job. Enrique Mendoza promised to return my re-manufactured engine in two weeks.
But when it was returned it came in several crates filled with unassembled parts, so I walked to Enrique’s house and hauled him out by the front of his shirt and promised to do him bodily harm if he didn’t pick up my engine parts and reassemble them as agreed. He got my point and brought his teen-aged son to help him load the crates in his truck that evening.
Chris watched the loading of our engine from the front door of our garage apartment, hoping, she said later, that I wouldn’t have to murder the guy. Yeah, and I’m the one who is the skeptic in our family, not her.
At work on the treatment plant all was not going well. The cowboy operating the crane was careless and his rigger was too. One morning they had rigged a bundle of No. 9 re-bar with a single choker and the crane picked it up to lower it into the hole, and a 25-foot-long piece of steel fell out of the bundle and speared through the whalers of a form my men were setting. Nobody was hit by the falling re-bar rod, but it was close enough that two of my men quit on the spot. I complained to the Superintendent
The Super walked out of his trailer with me to stand on the perimeter of the hole. “Accidents happen, Mack. You know that.”
“It was due to careless rigging,” I said.
“That’s the best damn crane operator I’ve ever had,” the Super declared.
While we watched the operator rotated his boom and ran the concrete bucket out to be loaded. When he picked the bucket filled with mud he started to traverse. The bucket hooked at the end of his cable trailed behind as the operator pivoted the boom rapidly. The bucket swung outward due to centrifugal force, and wrapped itself and the cables around the street light pole on the adjacent property. The operator then tried to untangle his cables by hauling in and managed to uproot the lamp pole and drag it to the edge of the hole—over the heads of half a dozen men working the concrete in the floor of the hole. The super was on his radio telling the operator to stop.
“Best damn crane operator your ever saw, right? Let’s go back into your trailer. You can make out my paycheck. I’m dragging up.”
On the way home I stopped at the Carpenter’s Local and got a dispatch as foreman to work on the South San Francisco sewer project; I was to report for work the following day. When I got home I found Chris doctoring A.J.’s hands, plucking out slivers of glass.
A.J. was more embarrassed than hurt. “We were roller skating on the hill near the corner store. I was showing off and did a cartwheel. There was a broken wine bottle where I put my hands down,” she said, wincing as Chris painted her small wounds with tincture of Iodine. Chris immediately began to blow on the cuts as if they were burnt, puffing her cheeks and crossing her eyes to make A.J. laugh.
The job, building stairs on the corners of the sewage treatment tanks was challenging and fun. The landing, its semi-circular wall, and the staircase itself were all poured at once, so the job was more than a bit tricky. It had been years since I’d last cracked a trigonometry book; I found one at the local library and refreshed my memory of arcs of specific chord lengths. Laying the the lines out full scale on a warehouse floor was a lot like lofting the lines of a boat and on them I built two jigs for laminating plywood to make the inner and outer forms to retain the concrete while it was being poured. It was as challenging as building a boat from scratch.
A.J.’s school let the kids out for their winter vacation at about the same time as our carpenters walked out in support of another union’s strike. So it was time for us to get our truck together and head for Florida.
Enrique personally delivered my re-manufactured engine and even lent a hand swinging it into the truck (the engine compartment of our step-van was inside the truck and maneuvering the hoist was a two-man job). But he wasn’t on hand the day we packed up and headed for Florida.
Driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge the engine began to cough and sputter, losing power. I managed to coax it into the open door of Enrique’s factory. I was fuming when I burst into his office and told him he had a problem.
“I want the problem fixed before you go home tonight. We’re on our way to Florida to spend the holidays with my in-laws.” I bellowed.
“Don’t worry, Mack. I’ll fix it, or replace the whole damned engine for you . . . and we’ll have it done before quitting time.” Enrique promised.
The “problem” was almost immediately obvious to Enrique’s chief mechanic. One of the temp laborers had installed the wrong valve lifters and several of the pushrods had been bent. After installing the right lifters, they replaced all of the valves and the camshaft. That engine was purring smoothly but powerfully when we came to get the truck that evening. Enrique apologized profusely for the error and wished us a safe journey.
We made a record breaking crossing of the Continent—for us. We left Oakland on December 18th and arrived at Christine’s parents’ home in North Fort Myers, Florida on Christmas day, just in time for dinner. That was remarkable, considering we had to hold our speed under sixty miles per hour for those first five hundred miles to properly break in our new engine. We alternated driving and sleeping in four-hour shifts, stopping only for gas and one oil change and Mac-burgers along the way. Crossing the breadth of Texas, 900 miles, was the toughest part of that journey, but it was the only time we ever crossed it without having a breakdown of some sort.
Chris’s father, Walter, asked me to park my ugly old truck across the road in a vacant lot where the trees and palmettos would hide it from his neighbor’s eyes. That was okay by me; I didn’t want anything to spoil the Christmas dinner we’d driven three thousand miles to attend.
The end.
