#21

I swore all week I’d take this weekend off but that didn’t last. Perfect weather – had an awesome ride up to 100th before I hit the plant. I ran into a couple around the quench station as I entered. Really awesome people – we walked around and chatted for about 20 minutes. We talked about the general state of the world and the plant and it felt really good to talk to someone(s) for a bit. I’d like to do that more often. I hope they didn’t mind my rambling as I tend to do on all matters Acme.

After that I headed back into the coal bunker to check out the area managers office one more time. After calling it quits in there for months, I pulled out some videotapes last week so I knew there was more to find. Well that is putting it lightly – I found the flashlight above less than 5 minutes in. I remembered to bring a dust mask this time so I was really making a disaster of the place, and it paid dividends.

At first I was finding an array of generic signs, like ‘FLAMMABLE’ and other non-descriptive boring stuff. And then….WOW. Almost too good to be true. As you can see, I have multiple of the orange signs on the left (three to be exact). They are in great shape, I gave them a quick cleaning when I got out of there. They even have steel brads stamped into the holes at the corners. The other one was not really worse for wear, just very cheaply made. It required a restoration which I’ll cover in another post.

A few minutes later I unearthed something truly unbelievable. I have been finding slide carousels around the entire plant for months, in different buildings and different places. I have also found more than one text which referenced slides, this only twisted the knife deeper and made me long for these photographs. So at long last, I found about 30 slides!

I knew that scanning these wouldn’t be easy but I decided not to focus on that for the moment, so I bagged them up and moved on. And the artifacts just kept on rolling!

Recently I started thinking about how odd it was I never even saw an Interlake binder. Unfortunately this one is pretty far gone (and I don’t mean the dirt). Had to do a catch and release. But what a beauty!

After I felt confident I had cleaned the office out once and for all, I sauntered over to the main office and back once again to the 2nd floor to continue my clean out of the assistant division manager’s office. Found a couple documents but nothing spectacular as there just isn’t much left. I have been collecting the individual cards/pages from the office’s previous tenant’s Roladex for months. It is one of those mechanical ones, where you move the slider to a letter and then hit the button and the lid snaps open. Some animal broke it and the cards went flying. I have been taking them home as I find them. Today I found a few and I now have A-H and K. I don’t think I will ever find the rest but these are pretty awesome. I won’t even scan them, I have a number of phone directories and I don’t want to share anyone’s home phone number. Makes me sick to admit to myself that many of these people may have passed away or at the very least, no longer have these numbers, but it isn’t right. So they will stay tucked away in the permeant archive they toss into a bonfire or more likely a dumpster when they find me dead many years from now. Here are the finds:

• QS 9000 Manual
  • I found this months ago, the first time I made it to the second floor of the main office. It looked like boilerplate so I left it behind. I finally grabbed it for a few reasons.
    • Mint condition (after a cleaning)
    • Not boilerplate – detailed instruction for job titles all over the plant
    • beautiful binder in a rare color (maroon) and the only one I have that showed the ‘MiniGrated Steel’ logo
• Pushing Current Monitor
  • I presume the pusher already had this but maybe this is a new version? Includes a quote, description of the new monitor and 4 pages of handwritten notes
• CSL unpaid invoices
  • I have tried desperately to dump the interesting Short Line and other RR info I have recovered from Acme to websites more interested in this topic. Neither were receptive. Not because the content wasn’t good – I know it is – but because they can’t manage to send/recieve emails. So it is time for me to assemble and post these docs myself, and I shall, in the Document Archive very soon
• Fosbel End Flue Rebuilds
  • 5 page document most notable because it is printed with primitive color ink and/or low grade paper. Those things combined with water damage have created a rainbow effect (but still quite readable)
• COG line to Gas Holder (1968)
  • Probably the last document of this era I will recover as I already have rescued them all. Two page memo and two page proposal
• Ovens Best Practice Team (1992)
  • Very rough shape and still damp (drying now). Hoping I can clean this up enough to add it to the permenant archive but either way it certainly can be scanned. Excellent document on ovens department function
• Gas Safety Quiz
  • 4 page quiz from Wilputte tailor made for the plant. Clearly part of a larger training text which unfortunately I do not have.

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I stopped at work when I left the plant because I had a DIY solution to scan the slides which were quickly burning a hole in my messenger bag. Normally you cannot scan slides or negatives on a flatbed scanner because those items must be backlit. I did some internet research and find a solution and it sounded convincing.

By making a triangle out of paper, the color (white) provides enough diffusion so the light can shine through the slide from below and sort of reflect back. You have to scan at very high DPI to let the light move slow enough to do it’s job. Unforuntately, after inspecting the slides I found that 99% were ruined by time and the conditions in which they were stored. It seemed like the actual film was disintegrating, one side felt sticky. I tried to clean it carefully a few ways, none of which were effective. I read on Kodak’s website that alcohol was ok but this promptly wiped the negative totally clean down to transparent plastic. So I found only two slides that were worthy of scanning and one of them is quite questionable.

Last up are the godforsaken videotapes I have been fighting with for a week. Last week I found two tapes. One of them is a gold mine and was posted a week ago (and on YouTube). The second one was a real bear. First of all, the heads in my VCR are so dirty its a travesty. I could probably sit here and clean them for 24 hours straight. They have picked up so much crap from these old tapes that I have really done a number on them. But that is secondary to the fact that this other tape has a mechanical problem. Finally today I think I figured out that the cassette was squeezing down too hard on the supply spool so it could not rotate. As for the new one I found today, it turned out to be sort of a dud. The cassette was totally crushed as was the supply reel flange. The tape was also broken and it took me a minute to find the take up spool. Looks like a promotional tape for a fancy sandblaster that does not use sand. It is called the Accustrip from a company (since absorbed by another larger entity) called Armex. I could hardly get the goddamned thing to play so you are left with some screenshots.

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I finally waged war with the other video from last week for the final time. We all miss out on what looks like 60 min+ of exciting footage about asbestos abatement. I salvaged the barely there footage into more of a voice over. Enjoy and be educated!

I finally decided to get out of there after a few hours. I saw three fellows coming out of the battery #1 basement so I walked over to say hello. I showed them the tunnel on the coke side and they seemed interested. Had a quick chat with one guy about the Damen silos (which I have not visited). As we talked, I saw two more people just leaving the stairwell and getting up to the top of the coal bunker. I asked these guys from the basement if they ran into the couple I had hung out with earlier and they asked ‘did they have a skateboard?’. They didn’t – which means there were five groups on site (including myself). Too much madness for me – time to go. Maybe next week I’ll finally take a week off. We shall see.