Finally got around to taking my old computer tower into the shop. 11 years ago, while I was working in Tumbler Ridge, there was a warning placed out on the web about an oncoming virus and it was advisable to shut down your computers during a certain time-frame to avoid getting it. I of course missed it and when I got home and fired up my computer, the first thing that popped up on the screen was a pop-up that said, "Shutting down to save itself" or something similar and that was the last day I used it. I took it in with hopes they could salvage some photos, videos etc. Happy to say that they saved everything. I have an even older Dell tower that I purchased in the last century and I'll see if they can retrieve that as well. Anyhoo...there will be some photos and videos added here from my last days as a papermaker. Some are potato quality but that's the nature of the beast. We'll start of with the control rooms.
The Wet End Control. The Machine Tender took care of the approaching stock to the Forming Section and and monitored flow, colour, speed etc. He's the top of the heap in the line of progress
The flow of paper is looking out the back door to the Dry End Control. Here lives the Back Tender, #2 in the line of progress. This is as far as I was trained up and did the job probably a 50% of the time. I didn't like the job as it was very boring. If things were running right, you would push a "blinky" button every 50 minutes or so. The Back Tender monitored paper moisture, brightness, colour, weight etc. He also made the reels the right size and weight.
Once a reel is made it heads over to my "office", again looking through the door. The Winder, home of the 3rd Hand or Winderman. The most stressful place in the mill. One had to take the reel of crap and make it into a saleable product and believe me, some of it was actually crap. A reel of paper can be made into anywhere from 20 to 60 rolls of paper depending on the customer. We had over 200 pressrooms to ship to. The 3rd hand made up the orders according to customer specs using slitters to cut the paper. This can kinda be seen over the black screen on the panel. On top of that we were also quality control, making sure no defects in the paper left the mill. Our crew had the lowest customer complaints
The guy running the winder in the pic below is actually the Machine Tender. This was the last set of rolls that we ever made (more on this later). The guy was a basket-case this nght and to calm him down somewhat I gave him this honour
Rolls of paper are wound onto cores, similar to toilet paper rolls and they are fed into the winder from the 4th Hand station. He is responsible for placing the right core in the right place according to the running list. He is good at this about 99% of the time. When he is at his 1%, he has made a long log of paper because somehow the cores got out of order and now are no longer in line with the paper cuts. This is probably the easiest and most casual job in the papermill; load the cores in the right order.....most of the time. He also has to make sure that there is a small line of glue added to the core to pick up the paper at the start of the set.....most of the time
On the table you can make out four different size cores,. The winder is set up to make up to 12 rolls with widths from 20cms up to, if I recall 239.5cm. These largest ones were for Nation Enquirer magazine. The core were fed into the winder by a ram. They would drop onto a V-shaped channel in front of Aaron and be fed into the core loader that can just be made out behind the small screen. There's a small photo eye that detects the cores and when it senses nothing on the table it stops feeding and the core clamps close. Barely noticeable, the ends of the cores are bevelled. This tell me, that given the size of the largest cores, we were making rolls for the Idaho Statesman pressroom. Once a set of rolls is made, the roll ejector pushes the completed set out onto the roll lowering table, drops in a new set of cores, returns to position and the process starts over. The roll lowering table is seen behind the rolls in the photo below. This is the 5th Hands work area. These are the grumpiest guys on the crew as sometime they feel that they are "over-worked" and at times they are. Looking at the size of the rolls, 45", these were either for the Edmonton Journal or the Calgary Sun pressrooms. Doug, the 5th Hand was maybe 5' tall
The 5th Hands job is to tape up the rolls, insert bar code scanner cards at the front of the rolls and put in core plugs if needed. There is a set of stops behind Doug with number on them. These can be set up so that every second roll drops onto the slat conveyor. This allows spacing between rolls so that they won't interfere with the kicker at the end of the slat conveyor. This pushed the rolls onto the wrap line. I'm hoping I have photos of this on my other computer tower. In the background is the smoke shack. These were built after smoking was banned on the machine floor in the early 90's. The machine ran from 1986 - 2008. More pics and video later