Hopefully I find out tomorrow but next week at the latest if I got my truck bid or not. I'm pretty confident since my seniority is getting fairly uh, mature. But I'm gonna miss days like today!
All I had to do today was weld pipe. An extra pumpman came in on overtime (Sunday is double time for overtime guys so even though we didn't need an extra pumpman the extra pumpman decided he would come in anyways) so we let him do the rounds while me and Mike welded the pipe. Nightshift pumpman set it up for us, sort of. So the first thing we went and set it up more right, moving the lightplant which was our generator, and moving the welder into place. Looks like we'll need a chain to pull the pipe. Let's go get one! Hmm, no chains in my pumpshack. I know where there's one- only five kms away or so. Alright now we have our chain. Hey what if we move the welder over there? That would work better. We'll just need an extension cord. So we go get one. Of course there aren't any in the warehouse but we find one eventually. But now that we're looking at it, maybe the hot plate should be over here, too. Now we need another extension cord! Off we go!
Now we're set! So we grab some pipe and get it all in place. The ends are a little jagged so I grab my chainsaw to cut it better, but guess what? Chainsaw is frozen solid. It will need to sit in the service bay for a few hours to thaw out. Okay well, let's find some pipes with nicer ends and weld those while we wait. Cause we might as well do something before coffee right?
Suitable pipe is found and emplacened, only now the hydraulic control for the welder is frozen solid too. Anyways more rigmaroles ensue to get that working. And now we have welded our first join of the day, woohoo!
Hey, why is the generator kicking out? Reset the breaker there. Try it again. Again. One more time. Now it's smoking so we better not do it any more. Call the electrician!
Well, here's your problem, says the electrician. This generator only has a 20 amp fuse and your welder and hotplate are 30. Oh right. Amps. I know they make guitars loud but what they have to do with electricity has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
Anyways, what we wind up doing after exhausting a bunch of other ideas that all involve driving around the minesite is, we grab another lightplant. So now we have two lightplants to power our little pipe-welding operation, when normally a tiny little Honda generator is more than ample for the job. But whatever cause now we're good to go. Wait, god . . . dammit! I left my wrenches up at the dump where we found the lightplant! I never lost a wrench yet and I'm not gonna start now.
Anyways I think that was our final little wrinkle for the day and after that things went quite smoothly. Luckily our foreman left us alone all day because I didn't want to have to answer the question at 4:00 in the afternoon, "Nathan how's the pipe coming along?" Well, we're about ready to get started. Soonishly. We hope.