JBNeal

additional information - Floorboard Bolt Replacement

Our ofc.mgr was openly lamenting her impending 40th bday for months...I overheard a couple of the guys conspiring one day and much to their delight, mentioned to them that I had in my attic a wheelchair from the 60s (chrome rims, frame, and footrests, blue vinyl seat and armrests), so I lugged that filthy hunk out and gave it a thorough cleaning. On her special day, we swapped out her chair, and they set up their pranks, as she normally arrived at work over an hour after us engineers. Much to our surprise, she got mad, being very quiet and in control, just simmering under the surface judging from her clenched jaw and gritted teeth while asking her fave ppl where her chair was...they produced it, and she pushed that old wheelchair quietly down the long hallway to the lobby while the guys quickly dismantled their pranks planted around the office...I took that wheelchair out of the building when no one was looking a few hrs later, and the mood in the office for a couple weeks was tense with everyone on eggshells around her...less than a month later, I got laid off for dubious reasons, during our busiest time of the year while I was quite involved in multiple projects...weeks later, me and some of the guys wondered if that was the straw that broke the camel's back, as I had inadvertently stepped on quite a few toes during the course of doing my job for 6+ yrs, and she had a LOT of sway with the engineering manager, the company VP and the company president...and as circumstances have unfolded over the last 6+ yrs, that was the last office prank I pulled, as every place that I have worked since has been populated with ppl who do not have a good sense of humor...se la vie

My 1st project at the OEM was riddled with problems, lots of ppl pitched in to cause daily headaches...by the time that 1st unit got to the assembly line, it had gotten the nickname Lime Green Bstrd...it was then that I learned that it wasn't worth it to argue with ppl on the assembly line cuz they didn't listen, they would do whatever they wanted, curse engineering for screwing everything up, then let engineering fix the problems before deciding to listen to instructions. Because they couldn't listen to instructions, the first build had complaints that hoses were too short...when I tried to explain to them that the hoses were routed wrong, they insisted that the hoses were too short, with the crusty lead man cussin' at me to go get the hose stretcher back in the hose shop, with a few others chiming in agreement...I surveyed the situation and agreed, then headed back to the hose shop...the hose shop guys kinda looked at me funny, so I told them that lead man was pranking me, to which they laughed. I then asked to borrow some large slip joint pliers nearby and told them I'd be back in 15...I showed back up at LGB with the lead man perfectly perched up a 6 foot ladder and showed him them pliers...he tells me that those were not hose stretchers, to which I replied that they were johnson bar pullers, and that he should hold still for a minute while I motioned them big pliers like a snapping turtle...WHOA WHOA WHOA he exclaimed as he tried to scramble up that ladder, with the locals howling at the turn of events...in later years, when another new guy would show up on the shop floor for a new project, I invariably got dragged into solving these problems as I was kinda good at it and the guys on the line knew I didn't bs my way out of issues...the hose stretcher would be requested from the responsible engineer from various locations around the facility, as far away from the line as possible, with one winter it being located in a storage shed that was super dirty for the arrogant smart mouth engineer that blamed everyone else for his screwups...we had him out there for a couple of hours in subfreezing temps digging thru dusty shelves before I went to go get him, telling him that the stretcher was in Virginia being calibrated so we were going to try something else...when he eventually found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, he pouted and sulked for weeks...bless his heart

I noticed that our ofc.mgr would occasionally close the door to her office during her lunch hour, then eventually noticed that it was always on every other Monday...I then heard thru the grapevine that once her boys were old enough to stay over at other ppl's houses, her and her husband would head out of town to go kick up their heels twice a month...and yadayadayada Mondays she looked really tired...so one afternoon when she had some big meeting, I hacked into her PC to set an alarm every 6-10 weeks using an air horn soundwave cranked to 11...after the 4th time it scared the bejeezus out of her enough for her to yelp, she called IT for help cuz of some "virus"...GOOD TIMES

one of the 20-something office admins griped at me for filling out a form in black ink instead of blue ink...3 weeks later, on the day that she had quite a few reports due and was an excuse machine cuz she was always late, I replaced the 3 fistfuls of pens and pencils in her decorative cup and top drawers and 2 clipboards with packaged straws from Whataburger... when she strolled in fashionably late that morning, several of us gathered around and peered over the cubicle walls to watch her get situated, reach for a pen from the cup, then her keyboard, then her top drawer, then her other top drawer with a growing look of confusion before blurting out WTF, at which point we cackled at her like crows, surprising her before she resorted to swearing at all of us while throwing said straws at us as we fled...a few minutes later, I handed her a blue pen...and throughout the day, we would rain down a few pens and pencils at her desk over the cube walls after shouting INCOMING to which she would squeal and curse at us while diving under the desk...that was a fun day

One of the guys in the testing department was a real know-it-all blowhard, quick to shift blame and point out others' mistakes...a real ray of sunshine. I noticed that he would leave his CB radio on his toolbox and asked him about that one day, was told to mind my own business...a few weeks later, we had a cold snap but some European aerial lifts needed to ship, so knucklehead was out there freezing his whutsitz off doing his job, but found the time to cuss at me for some minor problem, in front of several ppl, before he went back outside to test another unit. Once he went out the door, I pointed at the radio on his toolbox, asked the observers "how long should I hang him out to dry?" , they all immediately began laughing, so I told the small crowd that I would be back in 15 minutes... by that time, knucklehead was in the middle of articulation testing, it looked like it was about to start snowing, and I returned to hit the e-stop on the lower controls...this effectively stuck him 50 feet up in the below-freezing air, and after 5 minutes I went back out to pull the e-stop so he could let himself down...of course by then the hydraulics had gotten so cold that the ride down was excruciatingly slow, which allowed me plenty of time to vacate the premises while he shouted threatening curses in my direction, much to the amusement of his coworkers...I later found out that chickens-hit tried to get me written up for some sort of safety violation; the only problem was that he was making a complaint to the guy that I had turned in his radio and asked him to remind his test techs why they need their radios at all times, which by company rules was a terminating offense. From that point forward, we didn't have much of a problem...

I'm gonna guess that it's used to seat the brushes on the generator so the stator can be inserted without the whole thing going catty-wampus haywire

I was hired by the ME Department during my extended senior year to finish a design project that we ran out of time working on, with the design centering on a GMC Sierra 2500 that was donated to the school (long story). After several months of unsupervised work, I was nearing the completion of the project, then I was informed that there was a delay in my paychecks 3 weeks in a row, with some sort of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that came as explanation. The department secretary informed me on the back steps during her smoke break that if I was not paid in full by a certain date, the university did not have to pay me at all; also, they could only pay me so much per week, not one lump sum...I quickly did the math and realized that if I didn't start getting paid in a few days, I was gonna get stiffed out of some big $$$ to a starving college student. So I made my move the next day...2 days later, the department heads involved with administering projects were cussing me out in the hallway between classes, in front of other students, threatening to have me thrown in jail for theft of university property, cuz that GMC had "disappeared" ...I smiled and told them that I was just so weak from not eating, cuz I hadn't gotten paid in almost a month, that I was having trouble remembering things; this brought snickers from innocent observers and smoke coming out of the ears of the aggressors...the paychecks started being delivered as required a few days later, and when the last one cleared the bank, I paid a visit to the department head's top floor office, walking past the department secretary and giving her a wink as I dangled the GMC's keys (did I mention that she was drop dead gorgeous?). He cursed me out some more, told me how unethical I was being (hello kettle, you're black), and demanded to know where the blankety blank truck was...I pointed over his shoulder out the window to the university motor pool parking lot 500 feet away, where that red truck was parked in clear view of his window, and since that lot was secured, it had never left the university property and the keys had been with the motor pool office the whole time, where I had checked it in under my name with the ME department... which was right next door to the university police station... he cursed me one more time as I walked out the door, and I patted the department secretary on the head as she was covering her mouth and turning beet red, trying not to laugh...later, I ran into her on her smoke break, and she high-fived me for my accomplishment, and relayed to me the aftermath of that whole incident as it unfolded in the department corridors, as egos had been bruised for the fact that some lowly undergrad had bested several distinguished PhDs at a game of chicken...it was a good thing

Our ofc.mgr lamented the lack of snow in TX as she grew up in Nebraska, so me and another engineer conspired to collect the chads from several hole punches in the building, then positioned the chads in the vent over her desk in little mounds in the duct...and for weeks afterward, whenever the heat kicked on, a few more chads would fall from the vent, which was located directly over her keyboard...so she'd either yelp from the surprise snow, or cuss at the chads that appeared on her keyboard while she was away from her desk...good times

I got my set from Terrill Machine in DeLeon, Feltz would be glad to hear from ya

We had an ofc.admin that for reasons no one understood hated my guts from day one and to the point of sabotaging my projects that could have cost the company a lot of $$$...luckily I followed up on everything that was time sensitive and had to work late many times because of her shenanigans. One evening while re-running a simulation, I emptied her paper clip dispenser and linked all of the clips together, as well as all of the clips in her spare boxes she kept in her desk, then put everything back so that when she would grab one paper clip, she would get a chain of paper clips...she thought it was cute and funny and laughed and decorated her cube with the chains and hung a few from the ceiling tiles, even telling her many visitors that "one of the guys" had gifted her this cuz they were so great like that... Two weeks later, I told one of the drafters that I had done it, and within 48 hrs, ALL of those clips were in the trash...but for a few weeks, every visitor would ask "hey where did all of the paper clips go", and depending on how cranky she was that day, her response varied from "oh the cleaning crew must have tossed them" to "I don't know wtf you are talking about"... she was a good sport that way

On various occasions when we noticed that our ofc.mgr would be coming and going from her desk frequently, we would take turns to lower her chair about half inch each time she left her desk...by late in the day, we could hear her cuss a little about her blankety blank chair...GOOD TIMES

We had a big project for the USAF, and when the 1st deliverable was completed, a pic was taken with the (almost) everyone involved in making it happen and put on the company website and newsletter... one of the drafters involved was often heard to say "do I have to do everything around here" and he bore a striking resemblance to Morgan Freeman, one afternoon I caught another engineer photoshopping the drafter's head onto every body in that group photo to present to him, we discussed it and took it a step further by printing up the original and framing it to give to him as thanks for all the work he did, then sneak the doctored photo in late Friday after he left for the weekend, to see how long it would take for him to notice, with small wagers being made quietly around the office. Three weeks later, someone from administration stopped by his cubicle to have him sign some form, and we heard her say "hey, what the heck is this?!?" in her typical shrill voice...you could hear the entire office jump out of their chair at that to see what he was gonna do, and Mr. Freeman paused a long time and says a long drawn out "what...the...he//..." at which point the entire office has surrounded his cube to bust out laughing, explain what we did, and wagers paid off...from what I heard, he still has that picture up...GOOD TIMES

our stern office manager was known for griping ppl out for not following protocol or not filling out the right forms or whatever, and since she also had two pre-teen boys, she would get annoyed and agitated at the engineers' ability to act like juveniles at the drop of a hat. One cold winter day, I was helping another recent college grad and one of the test techs in our R&D building when a piece of test equipment blew out a light bulb, and we needed a replacement asap so we could finish up in that poorly heated building. So we took a break from testing and headed inside, and I went directly to the office manager while the other two headed to the men's room to wash their hands. I told the ofc.mgr what we needed, she made a note and said she would get one while on her lunch break. I went around the corner, then overheard the test tech enter her office from the other direction and tell her the same thing...she was audibly exasperated and said she'd take care of it, and the test tech headed in my direction where I grabbed his arm when he rounded the corner and quietly asked him where the new guy was...and then told him to wait right there, I told 3 other engineers to go wait by the test tech for a show, and they immediately slinked around the corner to lie in wait...I went to go flag down the new guy to tell him that he needed to know how to order replacement supplies, told him how to do it, and told him to order a new light bulb for the test station while I went back to check on something in the lab, but told him that he would need to butter up the ofc.mgr that day because she was being a little cranky, so he just needed to step inside her door, and when she asked what he wanted to reply matter-of-factly "what does a brother have to do to get a light bulb around here"...he looked at me kinda confused and asked "really dude?" I said, "yep...she thinks that stuff is hilarious" cuz at that point he was still in the honeymoon period and didn't know what she was really like...he headed toward her office, I jetted to where the other guys were waiting, and then heard the office manager explode on the new guy with one of her griping diatribes that included WHY DOES EVERYBODY NEED A F'ING LIGHT BULB TODAY?!? At this point, we all eased up the hallway to her office door, to see the new guy with eyes wide open in a state of shock as he was still getting blasted, and when the office manager noticed that we were all standing there, she abruptly turned on us as she saw us with big grins trying not to laugh, OH GAWDDANGIT YOU GUYS NEED TO GROW UP!!! cuz she knew that she had been had, we all busted out laughing while the new guy stood there confused...he got his trial by fire and later chuckled about it, as he would also learn to goad that woman to get hysterical about something else trivial...for several years afterwards, whenever a light bulb would go out anywhere in the office or the shop, the protocol was to go to her doorway and announce loud enough for the rest of the office to hear, WHAT'S A BROTHER GOT TO DO TO GET A LIGHT BULB AROUND HERE, where she would quickly retort DON'T YOU START THAT $H!T AGAIN while those who overheard guffawed...good times

There are a few photos around that show flatheads and transmissions with pedals all bolted together, painted aluminum from the factory...they might even be in Bunn's books

We had a recent Baylor grad from Pennsylvania join the engineering department who could get snooty, and I realized that he thought I was some dumb hick with some of his statements...at that time, I was heavily involved in R&D testing and weld shop / assembly line troubleshooting so he only saw me as this sweaty, filthy knuckle dragging neanderthal, not the engineer who did stress analysis and product design...engineering was divided into cubicles with a central print station, my office was around the corner, he was seated 10 feet away from the big HPs, next to the 2 ppl who worked on manuals, one of whom was deaf. As it turned out, my print job did not go through cuz there was no paper in the machine, and I had recently spied that turd have the same problem but instead of filling the tray he only put a few sheets in to get his work cranked out. I mentioned this to a few coworkers and they reported to have seen the same thing at several other times. So I approached the machine, started to push a few buttons to make it beep, then authoritatively exclaimed that the machine must be busted (I was also known as the guy in the office that could coax that HP back to work after its frequent paper jams in the shortest amount of time). My exclamation worked as I could see peripherally the heads popping up from their cubes to observe as well as the manual guy getting the deaf girl's attention to let her watch what was about to go down. I then looked over at mr. college and asked if he knew how to fix the machine, and he feigned ignorance at first, but I pleaded with him to help so he begrudgingly got his slack-@$$ up from his desk to condescendingly point out how to fix the printer...I then asked him to show me how to fill the paper tray, he rolled his eyes then filled the paper tray for me, slammed the tray shut, hit the START button, then barked at me "Was that so hard?!?" I smiled ear to ear while nodding my head, he got this confused look on his face, and then the deaf girl started laughing, which caught him off guard as he whipped around to see her and the manual guy start laughing, which prompted the rest of the observers to bust out laughing around the office prairie dog village... at which point our stern office manager emerged from around the corner, laughing quietly, pointing at mr. college and saying in a mock threatening tone "we're watching you" ...he toned down his snootiness greatly after that, and on a few occasions was heard to join in on the that's-what-she-said random juvenile behavior around the office...good times

I went thru 4 layoffs in a 5 year period, with the last corporate workforce reduction coming 10 days after the company VP of operations visited my office (a rarity) to tell me that he planned on giving me a promotion with a hefty raise...each one was a punch in the gut that came with no warning as I was involved in several big projects... plans were put on hold indefinitely, relationships were strained, family and friends openly questioned my abilities and competencies...NOT FUN...heck today I get told to visit HR late in the afternoon, and I thought I it was gonna happen all over again and dreaded the trip down that long hallway; turns out they only wanted me to fill out some health insurance form...I have heard periodically from former coworkers about how difficult it has been in finding competent engineers to take my place on technical projects...a couple places have really gone downhill since my involuntary separations, which has kinda brought a small grin to my face knowing that the management that gave me the boot has had to deal with the lack of experience and strong work ethic available. The silver lining to this cloud is that I knew I did my best at each job and everything that I have done since, so I can hold my head high knowing that. I can tell you that the worst time of the year to get cut loose in manufacturing or construction is after October, as companies involved typically opt to do any hiring after New Year's Day...it's even worse in an election year, and the absolute worst is to be unemployed going into an election year. So the good news is that ya might have some good options available for the next 90 days...who knows, ya might have something pop up after Labor Day so you can spend the next 6 weeks being your own boss and catch up on chores and whatnot, that's what I end up doing, keeping my days full. Good luck in your search for a new path...who knows what the tide may bring

additional information - Air Ride Seat Anatomy

When in doubt, check the oil level every 24 hours and refill a couple more times after it drains out...if the level is unchanged after 24 hours, let it sit a week and recheck...

Maybe I'm not wrapping my brain around this, but the reason I got on PB was because there are file limitations on this site...I had tried to setup directories within this site's photo gallery to show full pictures as attachments had reduced resolution restrictions, but ran into organization problems that my fuzzy memory is having trouble recalling. I am guessing that in order to incorporate some sort of link from this site's photo gallery to forum posts will incur some sort of cost from the host provider...?

I have seen these kinds of patch repairs and none have been done well as the sheet metal warps from the excessive heat generated from long stitching welds. Parts need to be precisely cut so that weld joints are not too wide, as weld bridging is another source of excessive heat. One way to keep heat down is to braze the sheet metal repairs with oxy-acetyl torch and filler rods...either way, the weld joints need to be clean and rust free as slag-inclusion can cause a real mess...so the patch may be difficult but not impossible

From personal experience, these farmers may be complaining a little bit about all of the work they have to do cuz they have to work purt'near every day, year-round...they're loafing around cuz they are taking a break from another 16 hr day or waiting on parts while in the middle of harvesting and can't start anything else...and they don't get overtime, and some years they don't break even so finances get tight...or they are whiny crybabies that would rather commiserate than persevere... I've seen both kinds, cuz not all farmers are saints... As for having work done by professionals, that is totally true to give them a deadline or follow-up within reason...otherwise, your work will sit there while somebody else's work gets done cuz they will be cracking the whip...I once had a scheduled 3 day turnaround at a body shop for an insurance claim turn into a month long ordeal...that's when I learned to make follow-up calls to check on job status, cuz I did not have a rental car and became an involuntary pedestrian in a town without sidewalks during the hottest month of the year

maybe it has something to do with speedometer adapter when using a 2spd rear axle...? see 21-86-5 in parts manual

It looks like information on the hamb is being locked out already...