This is long and it's about my job, so you may want to just skip over it and come back later.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my previous job was as an arborist; specifically, a 'climber' for a local arborist company. It was outdoor work, hot and often uncomfortable, strenuous most of the time; often it involved working at heights and it required a heavy harness/belt on which not only hung my tools of the trade but my life as well.

I have now been at my new job since the beginning of April. This job, an apprentice glazier, is quite different from my last one: it's outside work which is usually hot and uncomfortable (see below,) it involves heavy lifting and I often have to work at heights with a heavy tool belt and a harness that keeps me from falling.

When I started with this company, we were working at a school, ripping out the old frames and glass and replacing these with new glass and frames. Since then, I have had the opportunity to remove and reinstall new curtain wall systems. Curtain wall is the glass fronting that covers some large buildings, as well as making up the entrance ways to most malls, office buildings and the like. I have also worked on a skylight at the Sudbury Cancer Treatment Center. That was interesting, both for us and the folks below who, when they looked up at our bodies laying prostrate on the angled skylight, seemed to have the startled look of someone who realizes almost too late that something is about to fall on them. We were only replacing the outside trim, so there was no danger, but still, it was funny.

Lately, however, I have been working at Xstrata, or the old Falconbridge (the other nickel company) to those who don't follow mining company mergers and take-overs -- I have to: I live in Sudbury. They are putting in a new smelter and calciner plant. Before it starts to sound like I know what these are, let me just say that I don't. I have no idea, except that the new plant involves miles and miles of piping, from the small, quarter inch lines that feed the controls, dials and moniters, to the huge, 10-foot diameter pipes that must feed (or be fed by) the monstrous hoppers and vats inside the building. It is industry at its' finest.

It is this building that houses the hoppers, vats and such, that we were working on. All week, at our other job site, the talk was of how we were going to install the massive windows. The smallest unit was ten feet by six feet, so when I say they were big, I'm not exaggerating; in fact, I know people with smaller decks. So far, the style of glass that we had been installing is one sheet of quarter-inch tempered glass with a half-inch rubberized band in the middle to seal in the argon, and then another sheet of quarter inch glass on the other side of the band, making a unit thickness of one inch in total. For an estimate on weight, this is the formula: quarter-inch, tempered glass (two sides) plus a half-inch rubberized band weighs 7.1 pounds per square foot. Go ahead and do the math, or take my word for it: glass is heavy.

As I was saying, the topic of how to move these units of glass into the openings at Xstrata was quite thoroughly discussed. The more experienced glaziers decided that the best way would be to use a boom truck with this electric suction cup device that our company has. Normally, to fit the unit of glass into an opening, we use a suction cup with a handle on it so that we can lift the glass easily and safely. The electric one that was going to be used is just like our little ones, only a lot bigger and instead of one cup, it has four, which are able to be extended on movable arms for extra large glass.

What you can't see in this picture is how the wind is making this unit spin. It was spinning so fast that the swivel on the boom trucks' ball couldn't keep up and it ended up twisting the sling that held the electric cups on. We were close to the unit and if it had nicked us in the basket or the corner of the building, there would be glass everywhere.

I finally managed to get the glass under control. The round disks on the bottom corners are our suction cups, to which we have tied a small rope to help in controlling the unit until we can reach the cups.

Installation day came and the electric cups were taken out, fully charged and hooked onto the boom trucks' ball with a sling. The day previous, when we went to size up the situation and plan how we would work things, Rob, one of the glaziers, noticed that the glass was not the quarter-inch, tempered style that we had been installing, but rather a much weaker, eighth-inch plate glass with a half inch rubberized banding. Immediately, he was concerned that the glass was not strong enough to be lifted by the boom truck and electric cups. He decided to chance it, anyway, since we had no other way of getting the glass to where it needed to be.

Normally, when we install the glass from the outside, we use our snorkle-lift machine (like the blue one in the pictures) to lift the person in the bucket and the unit of glass on specially designed skis on the outside of the basket, even though it may be over the recommended weight capacity of the machine. At Xstrata, however, they are so safety conscious that they employ a person to oversee all the trades people who are working on the site. In fact, he is the one who these pictures are from. He makes sure that we are wearing our gloves and long sleeves (even in +33 degree heat), that we are harnessed and tied in to our machine and that we are following site-specific indoctrination rules. He takes his job seriously and kicked off one worker while we were there. My point in all of this is that with our tools and myself and Don, the other glazier I'd be working in the basket with, we were almost at the machine's capacity, and we still had a 300+ pound unit of glass to consider, if we were going to forego the boom truck route. The safety guy would never accept that. So, boom truck it was.

This is one side of the building. The Genie Lift (or Snorkle lift) has a 65 foot reach, and when it is fully extended, there is about two, maybe three feet of vertical play because of the flex in the boom. It doesn't sound like much, but when you're at the machine's maximum reach, it feels as though the whole thing is going to tip over.

I can say that the glass went in smoothly and the boom truck worked extremely well, as did the electric cups. No glass was broken, we violated no Xstrata safety concerns, except perhaps, rolling up our sleeves and taking off our gloves but if we were noticed, nothing was said.

Don and I guiding another unit into place.

So there it is: my new job.