(Blogger’s note: You can read Part 1 of this story here.)

The disastrous end to my supervisor position proved to be very fortunate in the long run. I did not care much for that job and was bored with the repetitive nature and dealing with employee issues. The move into the engineering department allowed me to do what I was best at. That was to find problems to solve, design, and justify productivity improvements throughout the plant and help figure out how best to produce new products. I also was given the opportunity to attend a facility design course and several other seminars and training courses.

I suppose I had better go back to the beginning of this story to provide some more background.

When I first went to work at Con Met in 1964, the facilities consisted of a 60’ by 60’ concrete tilt-up building and a 40′ trailer for the office on 20 acres in the newly opened Rivergate Industrial Area. This is at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. It had been swampy and crossed by several sloughs, which I and friends explored when we were in grade school since we lived about a quarter of a mile away.

To make this ready for industrial buildings, the sediment dredged from both rivers to deepen their channels for ocean-going freighter traffic was deposited on this area and the sloughs filled. Con Met’s building was the second to be constructed there after the Ash Grove Lime plant. It was put up in a hurry in late summer, but the joints between the wall sections were not sealed before winter set in. That year it snowed a lot in Portland and resulted in the restroom having snow drifting through the joints and around the toilets. That made for quick breaks.

Over the next four years, the plant was expanded first to 60’ by 120’ and then again to 120’ by 240’.

Machinery was added to fully machine all castings produced in the foundry, sheet metal for compressed air tanks for truck brake systems, truck mufflers, and bent parts for exhaust systems.

A separate building to the south was constructed and equipped for producing class 8 truck radiators.

Over the next two years, I designed a production line for automatically welding compressed air tanks for class 8 truck brake systems, drill fixtures to position and hold castings in multiple spindle drilling and tapping machines, added multiple tool blocks for high-powered automatic lathes for truck hub machining, and introduced the use of coolant-induced spiral-point drills for drilling all the lug bolt and cap holes in truck hubs simultaneously.

This truck hub cluster of machines produced a finished hub from raw aluminum castings to finished, ready-to-assemble products in about four minutes total.

Additionally, during that time I set up and supplied a maintenance-tool and parts-storage area, a dimensional-quality control room, and designed several go/no-go dimensional gauges for easily checking conformance to specifications.

As an interesting side note, we received the contract to supply a critical large casting for one of the major class 8 truck manufacturers. After having the molds and machining tools made and producing the first delivery of finished products, Con Met was notified the castings did not work at truck assembly. Of course, that created a panic and I was assigned to fix it. After the casting’s dimensions were checked to the drawing, it was determined they met the specifications—as did the multi-hole drilling fixture.

After puzzling over this dilemma, I noticed an error in the original drawing. To further evaluate, I decided to do a dimensional tolerance check of the drawing. To my surprise, whoever had originally designed this casting had dimensioned the distance between several drilled holes from one to the next and then the next, rather than individually from a single datum line.

The permissible tolerance deviation from exact location allowed positioning each hole to a number plus or minus 1/32 of an inch, and if those 1/32 of an inch were added together in the same direction, they could be far from the desired position and still meet the drawing specifications. The holes would not match the holes drilled in the mating parts at assembly if those parts did not have the same drilling errors. Unfortunately, the error was built into the casting drill fixture by the tool maker. After the drawing and the casting drill fixture were corrected, everything worked. A simple design error on the drawing created considerable time and dollar loss.

What the customer saw as the problem was really the result of the problem (see my further thoughts on the concept of sometimes the problem isn’t the real problem). Their incorrect design detail was at fault and not questioned by whoever had design oversight, or by the tool maker.

In 1968 I got the wild hair to go to Oregon State University to study manufacturing engineering since I was doing the job but didn’t have the additional education I thought I needed. After I told my boss I was leaving, I was asked by the company president if I would consider continuing to work part time while going to school. I, of course, said yes, since I had not yet figured out how to finance the next school year. At that time, I was married and had a beautiful, two-year-old daughter, so the continuing income was very welcome.

In the fall of 1968, I moved the family 95 miles south of Portland to Corvallis, Oregon, where I started school and commuted to Portland to work 3 days a week. When in Portland I stayed with my parents.

At Oregon State, I discovered I already knew most of the things offered in my classes. I did, however, get some good out of the technical writing and design classes.

In 1969, we moved back to Portland and I resumed my career fulltime at Con Met until I was asked to transfer to Spokane, Washington to help modernize a foundry it had recently purchased.

Read Part 3 of this story here.

Ken Kaiyala
3-20-2023