Week 9 – Pontiac – Clay Kurkechian

Last Wednesday we were given the opportunity to make the trek down to Indiana to Visit the Nucor/Vulcraft steel joist, girder and metal deck manufacturing plant. It was amazing to see that the joists and girders are still, for the most part, being manufactured by hand as far as welding goes. In this day and age, it’s rare to see guys on the line working when there’s robots out there that can do the same job. We were instructed that Vulcraft used robots for about 10 years in one of their plants but later decided to forgo the idea. The reasoning behind this was that robots are all about precision and when making joists and girders, you don’t need to be as precise as a robot will get, which led to too many unwarranted adjustments that ultimately ended with them switching back to manual labor. All in all, the tour was the highlight of my week and it was definitely a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.
I ended the week by setting up a few walk thru’s for some small jobs that were handed off to me. The first of which was a drain that was clogged in the South basement of building C. I’ve got a guy from Pros Services coming out to jet and camera the drains, but the fear is that the pipe is broken and that’s what’s causing the back up. The second job I was tasked with was a fire suppression job. There’s about a 3″ gap  between the concrete slab and the block wall on the second floor of Building C Non-Firing unit that need’s to be closed and up to code as far as fire suppression goes. As of right now, I’m planning on a fire rated spray-in insulation to fill the gap. More updates to come!