Screaming Hank

I don’t know what his name was, but the people on the job called him “Screaming Hank.”  He was a building contractor.  When I first met him I heard him before I saw him.  He was up on a building under construction and hollering to his helper for something or other.  We found out he wasn’t hurt, just giving loud instructions.

Some time after I first met him I wound up working on one of his projects again.  He was building houses from pre-built panels.  The pre-built sections would come in by railroad.  Screaming Hank’s crew would assemble them on prepared foundations.

My boss had the wiring contract for the houses.  The carpenters would set up the inside walls but not nail them solid.  That would come later.  I learned this one day when I inadvertently leaned on one of the walls and it moved.  I thought we were experiencing an earthquake before I figured out what was happening.

One of the first things I would do on this type of building project was get up above the ceiling level and drill holes for wire in the outside wall partitions.  After the trusses and roof were on it would be much more difficult.  Some of the inside walls came pre-sheetrocked on both sides and also needed to be drilled right away.

The process for the carpenters was to also set up scaffolding around the outside of the house so that they could work on the soffits and eaves.

One day one of the carpenters – John is all I know him by – was in the future attic putting roof sections together.  Screaming Hank came driving up, apparently John wasn’t doing something right.  Screaming Hank started hollering “John!  Oh, John!”

John didn’t answer, he just kept nailing.  He didn’t acknowledge Hank.  John acted like Hank wasn’t even there.

After calling a number of times Screaming Hank exploded.  He crawled up the scaffolding and started across the ceiling rafters toward John.  I thought to myself; “Uh oh.  There’s going to be bloodshed.”   I eyed the distance between John and me and knew I could never get there in time to help.  Besides, what could I do?  I would likely only wind up getting hurt myself.

All of a sudden Screaming Hank disappeared.  About that time John turned around with his hammer in his hand with a look that said he was really going to nail something.   I went over to where I had last seen Hank.  There he was lying on the kitchen floor staring up at the hole he had made in the sheetrock above.

I heard Screaming Hank say; “Now I have to repair that ceiling.”

Hank got up, got into his car and drove away.  Old John spit out a stream of tobacco juice and kept nailing.  He had never uttered a word.

That was the last time I ever saw Screaming Hank.

Or John.

That’ll Hold ‘Em

I have had my share of run-ins with different trades working on the same job.  For some reason electrical boxes prove to be invisible to sheet rockers.  I have been on jobs where more than one electrical box, installed at electrical rough-in, was subsequently covered by sheetrock.  In commercial jobs they can be covered by two layers of sheet rock.

Today a “tick-tracer” can be used to find a box.  Just power up the circuit and go find the hidden box by the live electricity behind the blank wall.  However, before tick-tracers were invented you could get close to the area by holding a straight edge against the wall and looking for a slight bulge.

On a job in Glasgow, Montana we were working on a three story hotel.  When we came back to do finish work on the first floor the boxes were covered and we complained to the sheetrockers.

When they rocked the second floor they went back and cut open the boxes for us.  They didn’t cut around the outside of the box.  The cuts were on the inside of the box footprint.  That did two things.  It left the sheetrock bulged out at the box location due to being hung up on the outside edge; and it chopped up the insulation on the wiring inside the box, leaving us to repair the damage to the wiring.

On the third floor when we finished the rough-in I left the power on to the circuits when we left.  When the sheetrockers started cutting into the live wires, the live circuits burned the dickens out of their saw blades.

The carpenters and sheetrockers were not all that happy with us but it was the last floor and we all lived through it.

Another thing I have run into with the guys that do taping and mudding is an electrical box full of plaster.  When perf-a-taping a joint if they had too much plaster they sometimes filled our boxes with it.

One of the men I worked with returned to a job to put in the switches and receptacles to find that all the openings in the kitchen had been filled with plaster.  The tapers (we called them “mudders”) had plugged our boxes and finished the walls so that the boxes couldn’t be found.

The electrician complained to the mudders and their reply was “That’s your problem.  You find them.”  So the electrician took a hammer and started down a horizontal pathway where the boxes should have been, pounding holes in the sheetrock.

The mudders came in screaming; “What are you doing?”

He replied; “You covered them, I’m finding them.”

I thought they were going to kill him.  But it did a good job of adjusting attitudes.

By the way – the electrician’s name was Buster.

Conduit Explosives

Since the 1940s there have been technological improvements in electrical conduit.  Over the years, in using conduit for electrical work, I have run into some unusual circumstances.

For instance, when building on top of a concrete slab very often the conduit will be put in place in the floor before the cement is poured.  The conduit ends are located so as to come up within the space of a future wall.  Then as the building goes through its various construction phases there are wiring raceways in which to pull wire.  When a wall is constructed where the conduit has been stubbed up, new sections of conduit are attached as needed to get to the termination points.

To run wire through the conduit a semi-rigid wire (called a fish-tape) is run through the conduit to an opening, wire conductors are fastened to it, and then the wire is pulled back through the conduit to the point where you are working.

There are a certain phenomena surrounding open ended conduit.  Some people are fascinated by an open conduit end, and will drop things into the open conduit.  I guess they just can’t help themselves.

One place we were working was next to a fast food place.  Someone emptied a bottle of Coca-Cola down one pipe.  When the liquid evaporated it left behind a substance of sticky syrup in the pipe.  Contrary to how cola works with your digestive system, this instance made it impossible to push a fish-tape through the conduit.  The only solution was to dig out the pipe and replace it.

Sometimes people would drop a marble or a little rock down the pipe.  The drag produced by these items made it very difficult to get wiring pulled.

One time, at a job site next to a college dormitory, the dorm residences used the open conduit as urinals.

Worse than that, yes – worse, was the time we terminated some conduit stub outs inside a location for concrete pillars.  Unknown to us the concrete workers had allowed some wet cement to get into the open pipes.  When the cement set it was impossible to get the concrete out of the pipe.  When we returned and attached the next sections of conduit to the stubbed out ends, we didn’t know about what was now in the conduit below.  Of course we found out when we attempted to fish the wire into the raceways.  Our boss suggested that we drop lit firecrackers down the open pipe to blast the concrete away.  It was a good idea that worked on some, but then we found one conduit that had too much concrete in it.

The ensuing blast took the conduit right out of the concrete pillar, taking a chunk of the pillar with it.  The conduit was split open, so we cut the bad piece out, put in a fresh piece of conduit, and continued.  We let the cement finishers figure out how to deal with the disfigured pillar.  However we learned to cover the open ends of conduit.

I know of at least three times where someone deliberately drove a nail through the center of the conduit into the wood framing.  On one of those occasions I was able to push the fish-tape past the nail underneath it and attach some of the wires and pull them back through.  Then I sent the fish-tape through one more time and got it to pass the nail on the upper half of the conduit, attach the rest of the wires and pull them through.

I never heard that it electrified the nail.