No reason, just pure guilty pleasure explains why this faux Beach Boys is on my Zune. The group, First Class, was a couple of English guys who were trying to get a Brian Wilson-type, wall of sound, effect. And I think it’s pretty good.
I remember hearing it in 1974 when I was running a punch press at Accutronics. I started there making $2.63/ hour as the shear operator. Shearing laminate sheets into smaller process panels, 12x18, 16x18, etc. My job duties also included unloading trucks that delivered copper covered laminate, the base material of every circuit board, that came in 36x48 or 36x72 inch sheets on pallets of 100 sheets or more. Laminates came from numerous suppliers, most of which no longer make laminate, e.g. GE, Westinghouse, Norplex, Cincinnati Milacron, Glassteel, and Dynamit Nobel.
Another part of my job was to unload 15-20 55-gallon drums of ferric chloride acid, the etchant used to remove the copper from the laminate in the areas without traces. After removing the barrels of fresh acid, I moved the barrels of spent acid and copper-contaminated rinse water back onto the truck for disposal. Several years later we became part of a lawsuit after it turned out the guy we were using to dispose of this toxic waste was dumping it in a site that was not up to code and was leaching into the ground water.
After 3 months of doing this I signed a posting and became a punch press operator at $3.05/hour. Several months later I became the punch press supervisor and then, just after my first anniversary, I was made first shift supervisor. I had just turned 20.
Running a punch press is why I now have tinitus and permanent hearing loss in the upper register. In 1974, OSHA regulations had not been fully implemented at Accutronics and the punch press operators wore no hearing protection and, indeed, most of us had radio/tape players blaring next to us while we ran the press. Placing the circuit board into the press opening, onto registration pins, then pulling both hands out to hit the two switches to start the punch cycle.
Much like the place in Indiana I was almost employed at in 1983 (see song #3), we did not have pull-backs either. In fact, to show our quickness, we would trip the press (which would initiate a cycle of the ram that would not stop until it came down with 38 or 65 tons of pressure and cut the outside of the board and punch all the holes into the part) touching the ram as it was in its downward movement, before it bottomed out and returned to the top of the cycle.
750 times an hour on the 38-ton press, 500 times an hour on the 65-ton press. (We didn’t touch it that many times, just when we wanted to impress the girls who walked by to other areas of the plant).
We were idiots.
In a future posting (at my current rate of posting about a year, but hopefully, not) I will write about how, 34 years later, I came to be running and setting up a punch press again in the same building (and maybe even post a video of me doing both, if I can figure out how to get a video onto this blog).
