My First Tester

When I first started working as an electrician we didn’t need much for tools.  A screwdriver, hammer, hacksaw and pliers comprised a pretty full tool selection.  The pliers, of course, must be able to also cut wire.

I remember the first time I bought a tester.  It was to test voltage as to whether it was 120 or 240 volts.  It had the capability to test voltage up to 550 volts, but we never needed anything that high.

I had wanted one for a long time and boy was I proud of that tool!  We called it a “Wiggy.”  I bought it at Markles in Glasgow, Montana.  I used it for about 60 years and still have it and it works just fine today.  It does have a few battle scars.

When you have more tools you have to remember to pick them all up when you leave a job.  I couldn’t possibly count all the tools I have lost, but somehow I always kept the Wiggy.  Sometimes customers would call me and tell me I had left a tool there.  That was really nice.  One time, when I went back on a job a number of years later, the customers told me that I had left a tool and they had saved it for me.  By that time, of course, I had replaced it.

One job I had was at a motel that had a wooden fence along one side of the parking lot.  When I was picking up my tools I could not find my Wiggy.  I couldn’t imagine where I had left it.  A year later I went back to that same motel and my Wiggy was hanging across the fence.  It had been there through rain, sleet, ice, snow, hot sun, below zero weather, no one had bothered it, it had not disappeared, and it still worked fine.

Attitudes have changed since then.  Years later I was working on the Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington.  I went to a restroom where there were stalls already installed.  (I always carried my tools in my pockets, and had learned years before that when you dropped your trousers the tools would fall out and scatter around the floor.  Some would, at times, even take a bath.)  This time I took my tools out of my pocket and laid them on a shelf outside the stall.

While I was in the stall I heard someone enter and leave rather quickly.  When I exited the stall my tools were gone.  I realized that working men had lost their respect for another man’s tools.

Going Back For Tools

One of the shops I worked for in Havre, Montana supplied us with our own pick-up trucks.  At the time, locks were not a general consideration for vehicles and these pick-ups were not equipped with locks.  I supplied my own tools, but without locks on the vehicles, and with the vehicles parked out back of the shop, I either left my tools in the shop at night, or, if I had work to do at home, I would take them with me when I went home.

The pinch would come when I went to work the next morning.  My tools were just one more item to remember.  A few times I would be on my way to work and remember that I had left my tools at home.  Since we lived about 5 miles out of town, turning around, going back to get them, and then heading back to town, was a situation that did not lend itself to getting to work on time.

There was a time that I was sent to a job on a farm about 20 miles out of town.  When I got to the job site the first thing I did was look the job over and make a material list.  When I started doing the actual labor I realized that I had left my tools back at the shop.

I tore back to town, went in the back door of the shop, and grabbed my tools.  Then I tore back to the farm.  I wasn’t noticed when I grabbed my tools, nor when I was burning up pavement from one place to another.

Sometime later I was telling another guy at the shop what had happened.  He laughed and said one other guy had done the same thing.  The difference was that it was well past noon when he missed his tools.  When he came back to get them he got caught!  How can you work for five hours without tools?

I learned to always remember my tools.

The Round House

My last winter in Havre, Montana the temperature dropped to 57 degrees below zero one night.  Until that cold spell broke, it stayed below zero, day and night, for six weeks.  It was necessary to keep head bolt heaters in our vehicles and plug them in all night so they would start in the morning.

When parking our vehicles during the day, the parking lot was not equipped with receptacles.  Using head bolt heaters during the day was not an option.  At noon break we would all go to our vehicles and start them up, run them till they got warm, then shut them off and go back to work.  The plan was for the vehicle to be warm enough from the noon idling that they would start at night at the end of the day.  It usually worked.

The winter with the 57 degrees below zero I was on a job wiring the new Roundhouse for the Railroad.  In the days of steam engines the Railroad would use a roundhouse to de-ice frozen train engines.  A frozen up train engine would be taken into the roundhouse and overnight, in the enclosure, the heat from the boiler would thaw out the engine.

The roundhouse was also equipped with a turntable.  The turntable was used to turn an engine around and put it back on the track it had come in on (hence the term “roundhouse”).  With the advent of diesel engines, the roundhouse was no longer round.  A siding would run through the round house with a roll up door on each end.

When a diesel engine froze up they ran it into the “roundhouse” on the siding.  They would close the doors and use hot water hoses to thaw out the electric motors down by the wheels that they drove.  Basically a diesel engine is just a huge, oversized generator.

We had been wiring the roundhouse before the extreme cold weather hit, but weren’t quite done with it.  One of the things left to do was hook up the electric valves on the sand pit.  The sand pit was located outside in the cold!  The valves controlled the pumps that transferred the sand into pipe via air movement, over head and dropped into a tank on the train engine.  The sand was used to provide traction on icy days.

Every time I bent one of those wires, the insulation on the wires would pop off like peanut brittle.  To complete the job, I had to unbolt the valve assembly, bring it inside where it was warmer, warm up the 4 wires with my bare hands, do all of the wiring, then take the whole assembly outside and make one connection.

One morning while we were working there, an engine was brought in to thaw out.  One of the roll up doors would not close.  As the inside temperature began to drop due to the open door, things began to freeze up.  Two carpenters were brought in with long extension ladders and short bar pries to close the door.  With one man on each side of the door, they had to pry the door down an inch at a time.

I have not observed the railroad reverting to steam engines, so there must have been design improvements on the diesel engines since that time.  After all, it has been over 40 years.