As expected, things have been crazy at work with the shutdown going on, but there have been some welcome breaks from mandatory overtime.
No telling what the future holds in regards to overtime, but I've been thankful for the unexpected reprieves we've had this month.
I've used the free time to upgrade my milling machine with a new 15" column, and to do some needed R&D... seems I'll never be done with that!
My new mouthpiece design has a ramp with two different angles, and has required using riser blocks to get the necessary clearance under the milling head to cut the steeper leading edge.
Using riser blocks is aggravating and time consuming, which made them impractical for anything other than experimental pieces, but now I have plenty of clearance under the milling head without needing them.
I'm happy to announce that I've found a US supplier of metric aluminum tubing, which fills in the missing bore sizes I needed but couldn't get before.
Now the Journeyman II line will have optimal bore sizes for each key, which is a huge improvement over the old Journeyman line.
Right now it looks like I'll be able to stay right up until they shut the doors for good on June 30th 2012, because the final layoff before then is currently slated to leave 73 people to wrap everything up.
My position on the plant-wide seniority list is somewhere in the mid-50's, but the 73 people remaining will also include whatever company people are still there, and none of them are on the seniority list.
They've been jumping ship like rats, though, so I don't expect there to be many of them left by this time next year.
Some of you may have noticed that my webspace is still there, even though I canceled my Internet service with Charter back in December.
That is an oversight on their part, likely due to the fact that my webspace was created by a tech support rep back before the process was automated through your Charter account management screen.
Oddly enough, I still have FTP access to it, so I'll likely put my webpage back there when the time comes.
No sense going through the trouble of moving to a new host as long as the old one is still available.
Well, that's a quick summary of what's going on with Humphrey Whistles at the moment.
Look for me to open back up for business some time around July of next year unless the plant shutdown schedule changes again before then.
It is entirely possible that I could start taking a limited number of orders before then if mandatory overtime comes to an end after most of the assembly lines are phased out, but it's far too early to make any plans just yet.
Are you going to make low D's?
