I was given the oversight of wiring a building that was to be used as a freight warehouse.  The building was not yet completed, so the window and door openings were open.  When we arrived we also found that the floor was unfinished.  We would be working on uneven, bare dirt.

Since much of the work was overhead we had a rolling scaffold to work off of.  Of course with the uneven ground, it made rolling the scaffold difficult.  We would take turns being on the scaffold or on the ground pushing it around on the frozen dirt.

On one side of the building we were treated to the aromatic issuance of an animal rendering plant.  On the other side of the building there was a commercial bakery.

I was the first one up on the scaffold.  As I was working the wind shifted and I was gifted with the wafting odor from the rendering plant.  It nearly gagged me.  I did as much work as I could but I finally had to come down to get some fresh air.

The other fellow got up on the scaffold and I heard him exclaim; “Mmm, that smells good.”  I laughed and laughed at his sense of humor.  He stayed up there quite awhile before trading places with me.  Finally I took my turn up on the scaffold again.

What had happened was the breeze had changed and the aroma from the bread baking plant was now coming through the open windows.  This might sound pretty good, but there is something else to consider.  If you were working up on the scaffold while the aroma from the bakery was coming at you, it could make you pretty hungry.  Then the scaffold would be moved and you would get the odor of the rendering plant.  Talk about cognitive disconnect!

Since that time the building we were wiring has been used for a number of different businesses.  The bakery is gone as is the rendering plant.

There was another rendering plant that I worked at down by the Spokane River, just below a community college.  I did some work for them and the smell was really bad.  The business end of the rendering plant made one serious mistake.  When I finished the job there, I waited for two months for them to pay me.

When they called me to do some more work I turned them down.  I told them I didn’t work for free.  Besides, I thought a man should get double pay to work in that facility.  Eventually they did pay me.

I believe the plant has since been moved because of the odor pollution that emanated from the plant.  At least, I don’t smell them in the wind when I drive by that location anymore.

One of the jobs I did on the WSU campus in Pullman was wiring and installing street lighting.  The job entailed working in the tunnels under the sidewalk area along the main drive on campus.  The tunnels were about 6 feet high and 4 feet wide, with access points every block or so.

That year the outside temperature was at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  You would think that in the tunnel it would be a cool working environment in the summer.

Wrong!!

There were also steam pipes installed in those tunnels.  Much of the outside insulation for the steam pipes was no longer in existence.  Our job was to drill holes in the concrete walls to feed wire to the light standards.  Every so often we would have to go outside to get some fresh air.  Even though it was 100 degrees outside the tunnel, when you first came out you would shiver.

It was one job where it was advantageous to be small in stature.  When I drilled the holes in the concrete, I could rest the roto-hammer on my shoulder.  When the taller guys did the drilling, they were required to hold the roto-hammer out in front of them.  That was much more difficult.

One day I got sick and could not go in to work.  Another man was sent down in the tunnel in my place.  At the end of the day he said; “No wonder Adrian got sick.  I think I’m going to be sick tomorrow.”

We both held out until the job was done.

The hardest part of the job was setting the light poles.  The poles were manufactured out of concrete and iron rods.  Concrete alone would easily break if the pole were to droop or bend a little.  The rods would be stressed during the concrete pour, thus strengthening the concrete to withstand some droop and bend.

When the pole was lifted into place, it was necessary to use a crane.  The crane would lift the poles using a flat strap wrapped around the pole twice as a choker, holding the pole in the middle of the smooth concrete.  A choker hold uses a friction hold on smooth objects.  Since the pole is constructed in a configuration that goes from large at the base to smaller at the top, there is always the danger that the choker might slip at the wrong time.

Sometime later someone drove into one of the poles and broke it off.  There was just me and the crane operator on the job that time.  It took a full eight hour day to replace that pole.

One of the jobs I had the privilege of working on was a chip mill at St. Maries, Idaho.  The wood chips were made of scrap logs out of the woods.  The logs would be ground into chips.  Then the chips were sent through a shaker that would shake out all the rotten, worthless wood.

The remaining wood chips were sent to Rathdrum, Idaho where they were made into 4×8 sheets of chip board.  It was a good deal as it cleaned out the poor wood that is left in the forest, thus decreasing the fuel for forest fires.

My previous job had been in a large hospital where I had been connecting 100 Horse Power motors.  These motors were about 3 feet high and five feet long.  At St Maries they said we would be hooking up a 1500 Horse Power motor.  I expected the motor would be large; maybe as large as an automobile.

At that size and power, they were likely to tear themselves apart starting up, or start so slow they would burn up before getting up to speed.  A motor draws about seven times as much power to get up to speed as it uses to continue running.

I noticed we were hooking up heat banks.  The heat banks would go through heating elements that cut the voltage down.  This allowed the motor to start slow and then when it got to a certain speed an element would cut out thus increasing the voltage as the speed increased.  This all made sense.

Then they brought in the motor on a flatbed trailer.  I went out to look at it.  Here it was only about a 2 foot cube.  I wondered how they could get that much power out of such a small motor.  Then I found out that instead of operating at 240 or 480 volts, this motor operated at 13,000 volts.

That’s how they got so much power out of a small motor, and why there was the need for the heat banks.

When the chipper was first turned on, it made my hair stand on end.  If a man fell into those chippers, he wouldn’t last long enough to scream.  That machine would grind up a log 2 feet across and 20 feet long in less than five minutes.

Our company also had work at the chipboard plant in Rathdrum.  The plant was highly automated.  On the manufacturing floor there was one man who ran a bull dozer and loaded the chips into a huge hopper.

Two men sat at two controllers.  About three other men loaded the finished chip board into stacks as they came off of the machine.  There was also one man running a fork lift to haul the stacks away to store them.

The building was so large I never did see the storage area, or for that matter, a lot of other areas in it.  In fact the building was large enough that when we did work in the middle of the winter, a separate building – within the main building – was built, insulated, and heated so that we could have a warm place to eat our lunch.

While I was there doing electrical work, an engineer from our office came to visit the jobsite and see how we were doing.  He asked me how I had enjoyed the job at the chip mill in St. Maries.  I told him I was amazed by such a powerful motor and how the higher voltage increased the efficiency.

He told me; “That is nothing.  We just finished hooking up a 5,000 Horse Power electric motor for the air conditioning at the Beasley Auditorium in Pullman, Washington.”

I never saw the motor at Beasley, although I did a lot of work on the college campus.

I also did a job on the Coulee Dam in Washington, and was able to see the huge generators there.  I began to realize that there are huge motors running at various institutions around the world that taxes the imagination.