telling old stories - part I

Introduction

This is the place of where the eyes get a rest and the mind is send on a journey: A retired engineer and maturing academic has been writing stories for this space. Currently he is still running around (like the old Maritime saying, "Like a fart in a mitt."), thinking of his past and what possible stories might be dredged up. His wife had suggested for already some time that he write this sort of stuff down, but he has demurred for who would want to read it? But, in retrospect there has to be something in 51 years of work that might be interesting. So, he will give it a thought.

How everything started …

After high school graduation, around August,1947, my mother asked if I was going to look for a job! My father found me a job at "Mother Domino Bridge", where I worked in the print room - slicing shop bills and shirtail drawings from the back of a huge blueprint machine that was operated with carbon arc lamps. Later, I advanced to be the operator of the Ozalid machine which made white prints. Not a difficult job until some guy from the erection department brought in his family tree printed meticulously in ink on drawing linen. It was a very old piece of linen and had turned brown. The result was that the machine had to run very slowly to "burn" in the inked image of this family tree. The family tree was a document about 15 feet long and so the machine was started and after about 20 minutes it was obvious that the family tree was moving off the paper and so everything had to be stopped and started over.  The "linen tree" was tracking in the slow moving machine wherever it wanted to go. It took several tries before an acceptable print was obtained. The cost to "Mother Bridge" was not that great for I was earning 75 cents an hour!

After a few months in the print room, I was moved upstairs to the Training Squad. This was a separate squad run by Maurice Loriot. The intention was to train draftsmen for the company and involved instruction in tracing, lettering, and detailing.  Many hours were spent with Leroy Lettering tools and I am happy never to have used one again.

Some of the tasks were interesting. One was the creation of the drawings for a welding standard for DB. The 8.5 by 11 inches sheets with drawings of weld types and weld strengths were put together by Alex Peter (irreverently called "Torchy" Peter after the 6 day bicycle racer of the 30's) and our task was to create his drawings on linen in India ink. I still have a book at home somewhere with all the old DB standards of the 1950's.

Someone in the Mechanical design section (the Honter office) decided that a compendium of overhead cranes would be made so that a book of standards could be made for quick reference. This involved drawing on linen sheets with drawing pens and Leroy lettering sets the large-scale assembly drawings. These were sheets that were about 30 by 36 inches. Since we worked with rolling parallel bars (I forget the exact term for these things) we had to work on a flat drafting table and stand on a footstool to reach the top of the drawing. After a day of bending ones knees forwards it was hard to stand up properly.

By 1949, I was moved to Jeff Smit's squad that dealt with miscellaneous structures. That was the most fortuitous move for we did everything.  One of my peers from the print room worked in the office next door a squad called Heavy Structures (George Kageorge's squad) and he announced one day that he "was going to be doing columns next week."  Wonderful! I had already been designing the rivets for plate girders, detailed an overhead signal bridge for a railway line, and had done beam, columns and even a truss.

The organization of the Heavy Structures squad was that the work was mostly high hotel structures with many floors mostly of the same plan configuration. This meant that next hotel was basically the same as the last one, except for a few changes in beam or column sizes and a change in a dimension or two. So, when the new job came in one of the older checkers would take the drawings of the old job and make scratch pad sketches of what was needed on the new job, but with notes like: use the same connections as beam B12A from the old job, etc. The job of the new draftsman (Gray Matter) in this case, was to trace the beam from the old job and apply the new information for the new.

At the time Gray Matter was to start detailing columns, he had spent over a year doing this mind-wearying and totally uncreative work starting with purlins, then going to beams.

Jeff Smit's squad was filled with young fellows like myself. Most were french speaking, but among the 12 or so of us one was the son of the former Chief Draftsman (Fred McMillanh). The son occupied a board behind me. There were two checkers who were older, and Jeff himself played with the telephone all day long. Perhaps he did a little checking himself. The major job we were concerned with was a pulp mill at Watson Island in B.C. It was for the Celanese Corporation of America.

Occasionally we would be sent to other offices to do small jobs. One time I was sent to the design office to detail beam-loc grating for the old Quebec Bridge. This consisted of panels of grating made up of railway rails with web slots into which bars were threaded in the perpendicular direction to make the grid. The bottom between the rail flanges was filled with a bent plate. In place, the whole thing was filled with concrete. At that time the Quebec bridge carried a narrow lane of road traffic and a rail line. The new deck was raised above some girders and the rail line was not used. (Can that be right? If so, then traffic from the South to Quebec City or the North Shore of the St. Lawrence would have to be at the Victoria Bridge in Montreal. That was the reason for building the Quebec Bridge in the first place.

Another time I went to the Bridge detail office (Dave Cutte's Office) where my board mate was Cecil Simmons, a recent graduate from McGraw. He wanted to get into the design office, but the story was that he should get some experience in detailing first then he would be prepared. So Cecil worked on odds and ends, but what he had to do had little to do with design.

One day he was given the task of preparing a flow diagram for a bridge that was going throught the shop. The days and months were along the top of the sheet - which was a roll of paper about 10 ft. long, and vertically the items going to the shop. Included were the days for design, detailing, checking, ordering material, etc. The boss was to fill in the slots as the job progressed so everyone could see what the progress was at any instant. A perfect job for a spreadsheet.

Cecil was so ticked off at this point that he scribbled a heading and was through the job in about 30 minutes. Dave Cutte simply looked at it for a minute, said nothing, rolled it up, and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Cecil never got another tap of work from that time onwards.

He came into the office every day, and did the cross word puzzle, kept scores of all the ball teams noted in the newspaper, and generally sat around talking to me or to  other people in the office, but never any piece of work. He left after about a month of this treatment. The squad boss, Dave Cutte was a strange fellow.

To be continued.

Sigi do you really want to read this stuff? It gets pretty boring.

And how it continued …

A few jobs stand out in my mind from all the lines that were put on paper. One was a truss for a school in Lachine - the location of DB itself. The architect had a school with a gymnasium on the ground floor, which extended the width of the building. Above the gymnasium there was a centre hallway with classrooms on either side of the building. This repeated on the next floor as well.

Because there could be no columns through the ground floor gymnasium, the architect had prescribed a truss that supported the top floor on the top chord and the floor below on the bottom chord. The only problem was that the corridor passed through the centre panel of the truss and so the diagonal had to be left out.

My interest in structural design had been piqued while working, and through DB, I elected to take a course on Structural Engineering by correspondence. The Company paid the up front fees and took weekly deductions from my pay. It was not really a bad course, although when the analysis of indeterminate structures came about, I did not have the background to really understand what was going on. It was mostly Three Moment Equation, and for frames with sidesway a Four Moment Equation. For the design of steel, timber, and reinforced concrete, it was a good introduction to the behaviour of structures. The choice of an correspondence course was made necessary at that time for there was nothing offered in this field outside of McGill, or Polytechnic  in Montreal.

There was a steel shortage around this time - the Korean War was almost finished about this  time - and so we were using British sections, Portugese steel angles of strange dimensions (and probably stranger physical properties). I remember detailing a truss with chord angles that were 5 13/16 x 5 11/16 x 5/16. Probably an underrun in the mill somewhere.

Anyhow, the truss was designed with a British WF section for the top and bottom chords, and British channels that were very deep - maybe 14 or 16 inches for the web members. The designer used a single plane truss arrangment so there was one gusset plate on the centreline of the chords, lined up with the webs, which were vertical. For the Vierendeel panel at the centreline, he assumed a point of contraflexure at 2/3 of the panel, split the shear to each chord, then did a Moment Distribution of the joint forces to the members meeting at the top and bottom chord joints. That meant that I had to work out the details of the moment connections for all the joints. But, each time I drive past that school in Lachine, it is still standing so the method was all right. For my senior report at UNB in 1960, I chose to look into that problem again, but had no help from the assembled faculty members about how to go at this in a more orderly way. The result is that the report is just a typical standard senior report.

When we got the STRESS program from MIT for the IBM1620 at UNB the first problem I ran was the truss with the missing diagonal. I sent a copy of the results to Clam Semnionoff at DB for his interest, but he probably was never involved with this job.