I am done with dealing with welders for now

 I have made a deal to outsource my fabrication to another company.   My job will be sales and CAD files when it comes to machines.  

I added up the expense of the cockup yesterday and it is now well over a thousand dollars.  It grows the more line items I see added.  

I took the shredder over to my buddys shop and all the workers there had a good laugh at my now fired welders work quality.  

I think the term they used was "inchworm weld beads"  the more we looked, the worse it got.  Found several welds where he missed the joint entirely.  

I kept wondering how he could not understand wire feed, or adjusting the amperage or using the timer on the mig welder.  The thing only has 4 controls.   Amperage, 1-8  wire feed rate 1-10, a timer in seconds or just no timer, and gas flow.    It is a very tough solid state mig welder, and normally does good work, despite lacking the fancy controls of a Miller.  Even me, with my only weld formal training somewhere around 1989-1990 can get that thing to sing.  

Anyways, my time is best off doing design, sales, and the lumber.  I can not wear all the remaining hats also.

I need to keep lumber production running as that is a couple grand a week there.  

Bad welding

 My new hire welder spent a entire week screwing off.  I spoon feed him little talks that should take 20 min and he takes half a day. 

Just shit work.  Customer is pissed.

Considering the wasted materials labor, its at least a 800 dollar loss. Plus client already getting a 200 dollar reduction on his bill.

My buddy at the rice mill factory will have his crew fix it.  As the job should have been some shearing, bending and welding.  Like a day of work. 

After todays bullshit

 Working on a Saturday to fix todays cockup.  New shredder is not good.  Very low quality welding.

Force feed hopper for the plastic lumber

So basically what this thing does is one of the last puzzle pieces.  Working the problem.

It forces the soft plastic that is fluffy into the extrusion machine screw.  Since the flights are deeper and more aggressive, It will grab a lot more than the extrusion machine can by itself, and force it in while also compacting it.  It has a inverter so it is variable speed so as to not over feed the machine.  Basically I can feed the hopper, and monitor the amperage on the extrusion machine motor to ensure that it is loaded up and doing the max amount of work and not overloading.  

After this It will be a heat exchanger that has been long overdue for the mold cooling tank.  The boys as usual were not keeping on top of that and by end of shift the cooling tank water was steaming like a hot cup of coffee.  Insufficient cooling of the lumber in the mold risks the still hot board warping.

 

Extrusion machine fixed

 Fixed the extrusion machine yesterday morning and pumped out 21 pieces of 2x4 lumber.  

Extrusion machine broke

 The extrusion machine broke.  I attempted to fix, but my only helpers are not so bright and was going to make it worse.  I instruct one to remove chain from sprocket, so he starts removing the damn sprocket.  

Sexytary left the shop in a huff a hour previous, so no one there to instruct in Tagalog.

I stopped that task and had them pull all the molds and related stuff around the machine so we could work easier.  I have a LOT of molds now. Easily a ton of metal there.  

Everything is on racking outside for now all organized. 

The rack of reject and odd lumber pieces has been removed from the building and cut into 3 foot lengths to use in the pallet project. 

This was sexytary department, but apparently it is back in my department, the whole shop organization.  The shop used to be quite tidy, but now it has become increasingly disorganized. 

I painted epoxy paint yesterday.  To find out that not a single employee aside from myself knew how to run a paint sprayer.  To make matters even more dire, not a single one knew what epoxy paint was, or even the concept of 2 part epoxy glue 

Today final color paint on this shredder.  It is not as nice as I would like. But the customer rushed me, and sexytary put 2 weeks on the contract quote, instead of three, which was my plan.  So the order is at 2 and half weeks. Customer is bullying my office girl and is now threatening legal action. It is a total shit show all around.

No pallets

 Still have not gotten pallets made.  Dealing with shredder, extrusion machine and sexytary issues.

New welder works slow as hell.  Its been a grind.

Extrusion machine ran great.  Pumping out a board every 13 min.  Then it hit some metal and now I gotta punch the screw back out with a sledgehammer. 

Sexytary is being extremely difficult making life miserable.  I beg her to get help. But refusal.

The cherry on the shit sundae, is i think.someone trying to set me up again.

Kept smelling something awful for days.  The old man went behind the building and found a dead dog in the dog cage behind the shop.  No idea, not my dog.  

Dead dog was buried, but I am now awaiting the visit of some self appointed activist if it is a setup.

Im so disorganized. I need pallets

 They say never get high on your own supply. But today is different.

Saturday night I got a delivery of MORE plastic.  1.4 metric tons in 33 sacks. The shop is a mess now.

So I am forced to use a bunch of 2x4 boards that I originally was counting towards a order to build pallets.  

I will take the most ugly boards and at risk of rejection from the stack to use.  

As my jumbo sacks are 34x34 inches and my boards are a bit above 6 feet long, I will just saw the 2x4 boards into two equally lengths, and make a square pallet just slightly bigger than the jumbo sack. 

Soon my logistics will be where I can unload outside on a pallet with the forklift, drop the pallet at the shop door, and use the pallet jack inside.  

As of now I have material shredded to make well over 650 pieces of 2x4 lumber.

Meanwhile super far behind on this plastic shredder orders.  New welder guy is slow. He needs a helper.