I never had a bad job... A friend recruited me to a polymers compounding company 10years ago. He wanted me in R&D but the only way in was through the factory floor. I operated a recycling extruder. We took industrial cut-offs from the diaper and adult diaper industry and shredded, heated and extruded pellets (all in one machine) to feed as filler into one of our products. This was fun, interesting and challanging but when there were no bales of diaper scrap I would be called into other rolls. One of our products was "Sheet goods". 1/8' thick sheet used to mold package trays (that shelf under your rear window in a sedan) or load floors (SUV or Sedan trunk floors), door panels etc. Anyway, absent diaper material I would get called to a sheet line. Imagine a 2 1/2' x 4' hot sheet rolling out of the extruder every 20 second or so. Stack it perfect, count out 50 or 100 stack, pallet wrap it and stack it in the warehouse all night long. Crazy thing was there were guys who loved working on the sheet lines.
These sheets for package trays have to be perforated with holes for stereo speakers. That's done one at a time in a big 100 ton punch press. Getting sent over to the punch press (140db) sucked.
I only spent 3 or so months on the production side and it was educational and I made a ton of contacts which made my R&D function easier later on.
These sheets for package trays have to be perforated with holes for stereo speakers. That's done one at a time in a big 100 ton punch press. Getting sent over to the punch press (140db) sucked.
I only spent 3 or so months on the production side and it was educational and I made a ton of contacts which made my R&D function easier later on.