Work has been nuts

09/10/2011

We've been working a lot of extra hours at work for the past couple of months. We have to complete the design, build, and deliver ten carbines to the government for the Army to consider for a contract. The carbines have to be delivered by the last week of this month so we've been running around like our ass is on fire and our hair is catching to try and get everything built. We've been testing everything as we get parts made, occasionally we find a problem and we have to make changes to improve the design. I had some parts being made by a machine shop in Pennsylvania when we discovered that we needed to make a material change. I called the company to put them on hold for a few days while I made the change and analyzed the reduction in stress then notified the company of the changes and gave them approval to resume work. This was on Thursday, September 1. Immediately after I gave them approval to resume production the company was caught in the flooding in Pennsylvania and they were shut down for over a week. They notified me that it would be the 19th of OCTOBER before the parts would be ready now! Not their fault, but since I need my parts sooner I had to talk to the guys in our prototype shop to try and get them made in house.

Then, today I had to go in and shoot a cycle of testing. A cycle is 1200 rounds, I was the third engineer to fire a cycle on that gun today and it was going really well until a small part broke at just short of 10,000 total rounds. I would have replaced the part and finished my cycle but I was the only one in the building when it broke and I didn't know which batch of parts I should use to replace the broken part, I'll finish the testing on Monday morning.

I've been working with suppliers, trying to get some aluminum coated with the proper color. Color matching is sort of an art form and the best match I have so far is still just a little too gold. If I can't get it better than that, the color I have now is acceptable but I'd sure like to tone the gold shade down just a little bit. I'll probably have to travel to either Toccoa, GA or to Detroit this week to hand carry parts for coating.