Six of seven days of my week
What you have to do is, in theory, simple.
Find a corner where two walls meet at ninety degrees. Take a steel pen and pull the end along the line made where the walls meet. The pen must be held at exactly the right angle, which is forty-five degrees from either wall and inclined forty-five degrees to the line you’re tracing in the direction you’re pulling the pen.
Sounds simple, but here’s the tricky part.
The corner is only a corner when viewed with a microscope. It’s the seam between two pieces of sheet metal that have been stamped and welded together like two overlapping pieces of paper. They’re each only about a few millimeters thick.
Ink doesn’t come from the pen, white sealant does. And it doesn’t just come out, it jets out at a constant rate that you can only turn on or off.
You can’t hold the pen like a pen because it’s the nozzle of a sealer gun. The gun kind of looks like a sprayer you put on a garden hose, but with a six-inch pen-sized nozzle.
As if that didn’t complicate things enough, the line isn’t always straight, if you trace the line too slowly or too fast you will have either too little or two much sealer in the seam, and if you don’t hold it at the right angle the nozzle will get thrown out of the seam at the slightest bump.
That’s what you have to do.
At least, that’s what you have to do if you’re me this summer.
I work on the line at a very large car factory. I’m in the paint shop, on the sealer deck. And I get a damn high rate of pay. Eight hours a day, six days a week. Shift work. With an hour-long commute.
The cars are just frames and bodies when they get to me. They have no wheels, engines, windows, interiors, seats, electronics, shocks or anything else. They’re just dull green shells that will be painted after I see them and then stuffed with the things cars are made of.
What my sub-department has to do is seal all the seams where metal has been welded together. We do this by applying sealer along the seams in the wordy manner described above and then smoothing out the sealer with a brush or flattening it with a ‘scive’, which is a little flexible rubber crescent on a stick. (I’m guessing at the spelling, and even a little at the name. It’s hard to tell if people call it a ‘scive’ or a ‘scibe’. Whichever, the word is also a verb to describe what you do with the object.)
To paraphrase the giant Slavic gentleman who’s been training me the last few shifts, it’s not heavy labour, it’s art. But it’s art performed in less then twenty seconds (depending on the specific job) more than five hundred times a shift.
There are probably about sixty different jobs on the sealer deck and I’ve been trained on four of them. The permanent workers there only do one job. I’m a ‘summer student,’ which means I have to learn a lot of them so I can cover people when they go on vacation.
My favourite so far is ‘roof ditch’ because I’ve done it enough shifts to not have to think about what I’m doing. For this one, what I do is seal a seam in the ditch that runs along the right side of the car’s roof where the roof is joined to the side of the car. I drag the sealer gun from the back to the front, then scive the sealer flat into the two inches of seam I can reach at the front (over the top right corner of the windshield), flip the scive around and brush the sealer flat into the seam through the ditch, flip the brush around again and scive the last two inches of the seam (top corner of rear window). It took me a few days to get it down because you need to hold the brush at the right angle with the right pressure the whole time and the only way to learn is to do it until you get it right.
Find a corner where two walls meet at ninety degrees. Take a steel pen and pull the end along the line made where the walls meet. The pen must be held at exactly the right angle, which is forty-five degrees from either wall and inclined forty-five degrees to the line you’re tracing in the direction you’re pulling the pen.
Sounds simple, but here’s the tricky part.
The corner is only a corner when viewed with a microscope. It’s the seam between two pieces of sheet metal that have been stamped and welded together like two overlapping pieces of paper. They’re each only about a few millimeters thick.
Ink doesn’t come from the pen, white sealant does. And it doesn’t just come out, it jets out at a constant rate that you can only turn on or off.
You can’t hold the pen like a pen because it’s the nozzle of a sealer gun. The gun kind of looks like a sprayer you put on a garden hose, but with a six-inch pen-sized nozzle.
As if that didn’t complicate things enough, the line isn’t always straight, if you trace the line too slowly or too fast you will have either too little or two much sealer in the seam, and if you don’t hold it at the right angle the nozzle will get thrown out of the seam at the slightest bump.
That’s what you have to do.
At least, that’s what you have to do if you’re me this summer.
I work on the line at a very large car factory. I’m in the paint shop, on the sealer deck. And I get a damn high rate of pay. Eight hours a day, six days a week. Shift work. With an hour-long commute.
The cars are just frames and bodies when they get to me. They have no wheels, engines, windows, interiors, seats, electronics, shocks or anything else. They’re just dull green shells that will be painted after I see them and then stuffed with the things cars are made of.
What my sub-department has to do is seal all the seams where metal has been welded together. We do this by applying sealer along the seams in the wordy manner described above and then smoothing out the sealer with a brush or flattening it with a ‘scive’, which is a little flexible rubber crescent on a stick. (I’m guessing at the spelling, and even a little at the name. It’s hard to tell if people call it a ‘scive’ or a ‘scibe’. Whichever, the word is also a verb to describe what you do with the object.)
To paraphrase the giant Slavic gentleman who’s been training me the last few shifts, it’s not heavy labour, it’s art. But it’s art performed in less then twenty seconds (depending on the specific job) more than five hundred times a shift.
There are probably about sixty different jobs on the sealer deck and I’ve been trained on four of them. The permanent workers there only do one job. I’m a ‘summer student,’ which means I have to learn a lot of them so I can cover people when they go on vacation.
My favourite so far is ‘roof ditch’ because I’ve done it enough shifts to not have to think about what I’m doing. For this one, what I do is seal a seam in the ditch that runs along the right side of the car’s roof where the roof is joined to the side of the car. I drag the sealer gun from the back to the front, then scive the sealer flat into the two inches of seam I can reach at the front (over the top right corner of the windshield), flip the scive around and brush the sealer flat into the seam through the ditch, flip the brush around again and scive the last two inches of the seam (top corner of rear window). It took me a few days to get it down because you need to hold the brush at the right angle with the right pressure the whole time and the only way to learn is to do it until you get it right.
