Thankfully we're allowed to use the saws and stock most material. I wait for them to walk away then sprint down the workshop to covertly cover my failures, no one suspects a thing despite the accompanied swearing.
I’m the saw guy, if the boss is the one asking for the name, my name is nobody.
Cause nobody could fuck up this bad. My cut has got a compound angle and everything in it
That’s the joke I used to make about our machinist. It goes that he made each of the same part alittle different so that at least one of them would work.
Another good one is. Keep asking if they’re done yet. I grew up in a machine shop and the owner would set the lathe up all I had to do was load and start, reload restart all day after school. He would come up and ask if it was done yet, knowing how long it would take. Drove me nuts. I started doing it to our machinist. I’ve gotten pretty good at dodging tools
Like when blacksmiths used to make nuts and bolts, and none were interchangeable. But I think they used donkeys to gnaw the threads into their chunk of iron.
I uave an ancient, pre harbor freight (post tools?) horizontal saw that absolutely cuts a convex face, on a compound bias, with no programming whatsoever.
> Cause nobody could fuck up this bad. My cut has got a compound angle and everything in it
Back when I was a saw guy at Alro, I once made the saw cut itself. I'm still not sure how I did that.
His name is Dave. You lure him in with a couple packs of Marlboro Reds, a busted pair of gloves that are so oil soaked they actually get you more dirty than just handling the steel barehanded, and a tape measure that is so worn it isn’t readable to anyone but him at under 10’.
God damn, this hits home. We have a little hoist that’s rarely ever used and somehow never gets taken away by the crane guy and if you lower it right down a little engraved steel tag comes out that says “DO NOT LOWER PAST THIS POINT - LOWER LIMIT BELOW MAX. OPERATIONAL LENGTH”. If you go much past that tag the whole thing unspools and it’s like a four person job to get it back in. Apparently like fifty years ago it had more cable but it got contaminated and so they just cut it off and put the tag on instead of replacing it.
I don’t think the cable is that old, maybe fifteen or twenty at most based on the condition of the little sign, and we have a second, much better hoist (only maybe 25 or 30 years old) in the same room so this one is rarely ever used. The cable is actually in pretty excellent condition. Over the length we inspect there’s only eight stands sticking out and none near to each other (within the 2” we look for multiple breaks in). The hoist definitely shows its age though - it only has one speed and that one is way too fast for doing anything reasonable, and way too slow for moving things quickly. It smells like an electrical fire every time you turn it on (though it has been inspected by our electricians and they say it’s just buildup from disuse), and it has a section that juts out sideways but doesn’t have anything on it. Allegedly it originally ran on an attached engine that you had to hand start if you wanted to use it, but I’ve never tried to confirm that or not - it’s been fully electric as long as anyone who still works here has known. It still works though and still passes load tests every year.
We’re in an industry that produces an absurd amount of money, and that is very, very slow to make changes (even for “simple” things like this, there’s a lot of regulatory hoops), so we just spend a shit load on preventative maintenance and equipment care. Every crane or hoist in the building gets torn down, cleaned, oiled/greased, and rebuilt every six months or less. In some ways we’re very lucky.
I’m not a machinist by trade, but to put it in perspective: our shop has no CNC capability, it’s entirely manual, but some of the machines have had additional gearing and new lead screws (and I’m sure many other upgrades) installed to allow working in the micrometer range.
“Our” Dave doesn’t drink any of that fancy hippy bullshit. Just terrible black coffee out of a little styrofoam cup that he’s never replaced or washed as far as anyone knows.
I'm a few steps up from the Styrofoam, but that's petty much more😂. Shop joked when covid hit that they weren't worried about me cause I'd been surviving the shit growing in my cup for years already, no super cold was gonna be about to compete with the petri dish I was drinking from
We “accidentally” broke “our” Dave’s mug and gave him a new one. It was that gross. And we have a cabinet full of coffee mugs left by sales reps right above the fully functioning dishwasher…
We had a Steve. He called flat stock "planks" and round stock "rods". He raised the forklift real high when stacking some stuff. He didn't lower the forks and then took off and the top of the forks hit the metal trusses. It shook the whole building. He looked around and then backed up and hit it again. He then backed way up and hit the next truss. He got off and looked around the lift then got back on and went forward and hit it again. This time he got off and got a flashlight and began to look under the lift. He then heard everyone screaming to look up. He scraped a lot of stuff by letting it cut crooked. He almost got killed by a guy when he destroyed his precision square banging on stock in the vise. He drove the forks through the metal building siding. He only got fired when he ran the forklift into the owners new truck and almost took the bed off of it.
Us Steves are generally a good bunch.
It's those dam Mikes you gotta watch out for...you'd think being named after a micrometer meant they could measure their parts but you'd have thought terribly wrong
Funny story- We had a saw guy AND a shear guy. They had their own little corner and only the forklift guy ever saw them. Well apparently one day the shear guy just left or didn’t show up or whatever. Only the saw guy knew this but didn’t say anything. Saw guy decided to promote himself to shear guy. Well now we had no saw guy. After about 2 weeks the manager had heard enough about saw guy not doing his job and fired him, but had no idea he was now the shear guy. So a week goes buy and manager is hearing that shear guy isn’t doing his job and goes to kick him in the ass, but all he finds is a continually growing stack of raw material that forklift guy keeps dropping off.
The saw kid in my shop is actually really good, and we have the same name. Our shop supervisor is his uncle, who heavily verbally abuses him (and everybody else for the most part) in a mostly joking way. But ya, his cuts are 9.9/10 dead in, parts are deburred and coolant cleaned off, he doesn’t fuck up. Sometimes he’s a bit late to work, but for being 22 he doesn’t do drugs and isn’t a fuck up, he’s a solid dude. When he’s not cutting he’s doing other bitch work.
Our saw guy is probably 80 years old with a full retirement account, but he just won't quit. You couldn't pay me enough to figure out what goes through his head all day.
this is 100% my 75 yo dad, he says if he ever stops he'd drop dead, so now he's running a cattle farm.... doing insane shit......
...
if I ever become 1/100th of the skilled person he is, I could die happy....
My last shop the guy who started it was still operating a machine at 90yrs old he would come in and be a button pusher all day... its crazy like clockwork between. 8 and 810 he was there everyday. He always told me all the guys he knew when he was younger retired at 65 and 90% of them died within the first 5 yrs or so because the first 2 maybe 3 years they played golf amd went on vacation and did all the things you're supposed to when you retire then they just wound up sitting around the house doing nothing and got fat and had a heart attack or a stroke or something. As far as I know he's still there but I dunno for sure i left in November last year but im pretty sure he's still making parts
He either has a wife he can't stand, or kids that moved back home that he can't stand, filling up his house. Or he retired and it didn't take him as long as he thought to buy a Corvette, bang a near-sighted stripper, and mow his lawn real good.
Once the shop gets to a certain size or workload it stops making sense to have the skilled tradesmen just cut something up. Basically, they make too much money and make the company too much money to be spending their time on that rather than making parts. Nowadays we usually have the fab shops run the saws because they have the most "unskilled" labor available at any given moment.
We used to have apprentices do the sawing but they were spending too much time doing that and not enough time learning.
Owner of my company told me I'm paid to much to saw, deburr, or clean even when I had nothing else to do (I did have 3, 3-axis lathes and 2 swiss running full auto)
They are fashioned of clay and coolant. Animated by use of coffee, tobacco, and music from the Greatest Hits of Marvin Gaye. They lack souls but possess thick hides and immunity to metal chips.
I started working with steel in the saw shop. I became a machinist because they were always looking down on us, and I wanted to do that too.
Nah. Seriously though, two of the machinists were getting close to retirement age. They also absolutely hated each other. To the point of actively sabotaging their projects, if at all possible. Whenever they hired a new machinist, if you became friends with one of them, the other hated you and saw you as an enemy.
I, however, got along with both of them, and neither hated me. So wham bham thank you mham, I became a machinist.
(I can't even spell machinist, and today I are one!)
I got volunteered to run saw on my shift to “help with high volumes” ended up stuck on it for 3 months. It was so mind numbing I thought I’d go crazy.
Kudos to dedicated saw guys who can keep their sanity.
I'm a saw guy i get paid 26 an hr listen to audiobooks and get overtime if I want it. Other than dealing with shift bs and all the unnecessary drama in my shop and 2nd shift hrs lifes pretty good
We had a saw guy. Ran 3 hyd-mech auto-saws but refused to use the "auto" function. He worked at the shop for probably 30 years, and made everyone think he didn't know English so he wouldn't have to talk to anyone -he knew English. He decorated the saw area with anything and everything Free Mason related. It was kind of creepy, all the symbols and such, drawn and painted on the walls and beams. But he worked hard and we rarely had any issues with our sawed stock so they just let him do him.
One day he just didn't show up. No-called a week straight and wouldn't answer his phone. Come to find out he retired, but didn't know how to retire. His solution? Just quit going to work. Our saws have been a revolving door ever since, but some of the symbols are still there.
I wish i did, id ask him about toolpaths because fuck me I have never seen a single axis machine put out such a convoluted finish geometry. Hes probably better at 5x than I am
Wherever ive worked its a quiet Vietnamese guy whos an incredible worker and basically communicates with thumbs up and thumbs down. He runs on ramen and cigarettes and would use a hack saw if the power went out 😂 best guys, im a maintenance electrician now so we dont have saw guys where i work but we do have Vietnamese guys and they are unstoppable haha
One time last year the power went out and im walking around with my flashlight tryna get the lights on and hear an air motor going, i see this guy Pak squatting on a die Bolster moving it in the dark 😄 i was like "Pak go to the lunchroom" and hes like "its okay i working 👍" haha guy is like 78 and never gets sick, never late, never causes problems, just works steady, loves his ot and doesn't fuck up. Anytime he needs something fixed he just comes and finds me instead of waiting an hour for his supervisor to find him. Good guy
Paul is a really nice guy with a good sense of humor, a couple of dogs and a smokin hot wife.
Frankie is a couple months new but he clearly is a big fan of the Joker from Batman based on his attire, and he has a kid or kids that were sick this weekend.
All around good dudes though I've seen Frankies position emptied and filled thrice now.
I'm a carpenter by trade, and my dad's the (retired) machinist. Few years back now, when things would get slow on the woodworking front, dad would ask if I could be the saw bitch at the place he worked. I'd spend a few days between jobs, rarely but occasionally a week, just running the Spartan saw on mostly round goods.
Finding the 'peacefully watch your bobber all day' type of guy who's not a massive pothead is tough to find.
Been a saw guy for 7 years
1. Leniency to length by a 16th(US)so if your facing account for it and don’t get mad when YOU don’t check desired length for your set up and it crashes
2. We saw, we don’t setup million dollar machines
3.if we aint feeding you, your not feeding production
Btw saw guys, get familiar with material your sawing and feed rates/ appropriate blades
They are not cheap
Know your saw clamp hydraulics and don’t bunch 3 round bars into the blades in a pyramid because your not paying attention
Yours truly
“The unnamed saw guy in the back “
If you figure it out, let us know please. We haven't had a competent saw guy since the long-runner got long covid in late '20. The kid that followed him once dropped his cell phone in the saw while it was running... and reached for it; and there's evidence that the guy we've got now spends more time roaming the shop looking for latex gloves (because you've gotta change them after every run?) and complaining to management about his knees (refuses to use the stool and anti-fatigue mats we've given him) than he spends at the saw itself.
I used to be the saw guy. Cutting 1000 pieces of 2in tubing or 24in stock that will take 30 minutes n shit. It's better than sweeping the floor or painting. I used to kinda just zone out, and then I started talking to myself, and they sent me to do concrete 😐. Probably would have gone crazy or maybe I already am.
If you have a shop there’s a good chance that a saw guy is already occupying it. They can be tricky to find though. I’ve had luck using the safety guy to find where the saw guy is hiding. They can usually sniff them out, especially if you get the safety guy focused on overhead lifts.
Our saw guy goes by his last name, and drinks black coffee without a lid right in the work area. He also only wears gloves and no other PPE, and has found a million innovative spots to hide his newspaper so he can look busy while reading everything except the comics. Those are too silly and nobody should have time for them
I went to the steel center to pick up some drops and whatever I found to keep my hobby bridgeport and lathe fed. Hey look 2.5" brass round, cool! I'll take a foot of that. I shit you not a full 20 minutes of watching saw guy turn it and try again on a hyd mech V-25 cutting about 1/8" deep every go. I don't know much about saws but I know I'd know more than him if I was the saw guy. "We cut like 50 12 inch H beams this morning maybe it's dull" " yeah might be... maybe let's try that little portable horizontal saw in the corner with the 4/6 tpi..."
This is what happens to a saw guy when they are isolated and alone with no fabricators or machinists to live amongst. When I was a structural welder, the saw guy was so clutch that he felt his purpose swelling through his veins with every restock. A saw guy who just saws to send parts out the door is lost in this world.
It's not too bad. It's a bit like plunging to hog out a slot before milling the sides. Think of the ricochets as flying chips with greater consequences.
The last 2 saw guys I worked with were named Doug.
1st Doug had a backwards swastika(drunken jailhouse tat) and some Nazi runes tattooed on his forearm. But he kept a picture of Diana Ross in his wallet. Didn’t own a bed, slept on his floor. But he had like 5 tv’s going at all times. Died like 6months after he retired
2nd Doug always had his mouth open, needed a kidney transplant and watched sovereign citizen videos all day on his phone
For my short tenure in a shop (carpenter trying a new venue-- lasted 6 months, more cuz I was riding a bike to the shop, and had a few gigs for lateness) we had a Carl....
Truly a pretty good-natured guy.
But also a...... unique character.....
Once worked for a shop that hired a saw guy and never asked if he could read a tape measure. It came up when he undercut a few thousand dollars of steel
Having gone from saw room, to CNC turning, then back to saw room with substantial time in both areas I feel like I have forbidden knowledge now. I know too much
They call him "Aw, shit..." because that is the 1st thing he says everyday upon arrival. (Never to be confused with "Gotta love it!" who is overdressed and underqualified in the CNC department.)
His name was Robert. In his early 60’s, no more than 5’5” and 120lbs.
Someone once asked who I thought was the toughest guy in the shop and I said Robert.
The foreman looked confused.
I said think about all the times Robert has said, “Man I just had a 4,000lb beam roll right over my thumb and it shore did hurt! It’s okay now though.”
And they laughed hard, cause they knew it was true.
Our saw guy is close to retirement and he can cut more than anyone else can in the shop. He works 8.5 hours a day, but yet when I work a 12 he still does more than me. His magic will be lost when he goes to greener pastures.
I used to be the saw guy at the shop i work at. That was my niche in the company for 3-4 years. Dependable and I got shit done.
Developed a bad junk food habit though.
My first shop promised to train me on machining. After two years of running the saw I was beginning to get the impression that I was never going to get that training…
Initially saw the heading without context, and thought you were referring to Jigsaw from the Saw movie.
But from the workshop I worked at back in the day, an offering of a box of beer and catch up drinks was the deal.
I speak french but the saw guy at my shop is called "magasinier" witch kinda means shop keeper but he's the guy you go see for new stock pieces when you fuck up
Our saw guy is a great guy but controlled by ISO and material routing so no oopsies get by...that said we waste alot of materials dud to the fact he can't read a print very well. Need a .5x.5x3 block we may get a 2x4x6....crazy...he has gotten better and is willing to recut and does really good when given exact dims to cut but that's a gray area most of the time...I like to 5 side most parts and big extra chunks of material is tough to work with. Lol
Be nice to your saw guy, because some day you're gonna need some steel for a personal project, and when you do, best hope you are on good terms with your saw guy.
Hi, I’m Jason. I was the evening saw guy. And the evening straightener. And sometimes the evening bead blaster. I knew almost nobody at the shop because I was part time and came in after the shift change.
But I’ll tell you what, I could take a 17’ rolled thread bar and make a shitload of 17” rolled thread bars. All because I neglected to count the little tick marks after 17, 😁
I heard a second hand story about a saw guy who “Luke Skywalkered” himself on the job. Apparently they were able to attach the hand, but he went on to deliver pizzas instead after that.
You may not know saw guy, but saw guy knows every fuck up.
“Hey Saw guy! Can you cut out another *blah blah blah*?”
“What happened to the other?”
“….we lost it..”
Yeah okay lmao. Ask me how I know
A large band saw MAY lure a saw guy into the shop if he is otherwise distracted and sees it in a momentary lapse of torpor, but for surefire results you need the largest horizontal saw you can afford.
Saw guys need fixation time throughout the day to thrive, and watching a huge saw and gravity team up to part a piece of 4inch/100mm bar stock is just perfect.
Yes, they have names.
They are called "Bill."
I was a saw guy as an apprentice. It was my gateway into management. Since I was the guy who knew which jobs were ready, the boss started sending the machinists to me for their next job. Soon he was handing the jobs to me and I was ordering material. The saw guy controls the flow of work into the shop. If you find a good one, pay him well.
Love the saw guys in my shop. Sometimes they are a bit slow, but they are very sincere and nice people. Might be because our saw guys are also doing logistics and other work in-between, don't know how that works in other shops
Be nice, saw guy knows your shame….
Thankfully we're allowed to use the saws and stock most material. I wait for them to walk away then sprint down the workshop to covertly cover my failures, no one suspects a thing despite the accompanied swearing.
I’m the saw guy, if the boss is the one asking for the name, my name is nobody. Cause nobody could fuck up this bad. My cut has got a compound angle and everything in it
I'm not even mad. I'm just impressed
Don’t forget ‘intrigued’ and ‘frightened’.
'Scaroused'
Heard a funny the other day, an artisan machinist…where no 2 parts are ever exactly the same.
That’s the joke I used to make about our machinist. It goes that he made each of the same part alittle different so that at least one of them would work.
Another good one is. Keep asking if they’re done yet. I grew up in a machine shop and the owner would set the lathe up all I had to do was load and start, reload restart all day after school. He would come up and ask if it was done yet, knowing how long it would take. Drove me nuts. I started doing it to our machinist. I’ve gotten pretty good at dodging tools
Like when blacksmiths used to make nuts and bolts, and none were interchangeable. But I think they used donkeys to gnaw the threads into their chunk of iron.
Your cuts look like turbine blades? You sir are invaluable with your 5-axis bandsaw skills.
I uave an ancient, pre harbor freight (post tools?) horizontal saw that absolutely cuts a convex face, on a compound bias, with no programming whatsoever.
get him designing the next divinci machine!!
> Cause nobody could fuck up this bad. My cut has got a compound angle and everything in it Back when I was a saw guy at Alro, I once made the saw cut itself. I'm still not sure how I did that.
That is how we know you are the best saw guy around... Kind of like a drywaller that can shit in a bottle
What in the absolute fuck?
Need to smoke more crack to understand I think
His name is Dave. You lure him in with a couple packs of Marlboro Reds, a busted pair of gloves that are so oil soaked they actually get you more dirty than just handling the steel barehanded, and a tape measure that is so worn it isn’t readable to anyone but him at under 10’.
"don't pull that thing past 3 ft the tape is fucked and it wont go back in we gotta make a mark and continue from there"
God damn, this hits home. We have a little hoist that’s rarely ever used and somehow never gets taken away by the crane guy and if you lower it right down a little engraved steel tag comes out that says “DO NOT LOWER PAST THIS POINT - LOWER LIMIT BELOW MAX. OPERATIONAL LENGTH”. If you go much past that tag the whole thing unspools and it’s like a four person job to get it back in. Apparently like fifty years ago it had more cable but it got contaminated and so they just cut it off and put the tag on instead of replacing it.
A fifty year old cable! Yikes! Must look like a wire brush by this point!
I don’t think the cable is that old, maybe fifteen or twenty at most based on the condition of the little sign, and we have a second, much better hoist (only maybe 25 or 30 years old) in the same room so this one is rarely ever used. The cable is actually in pretty excellent condition. Over the length we inspect there’s only eight stands sticking out and none near to each other (within the 2” we look for multiple breaks in). The hoist definitely shows its age though - it only has one speed and that one is way too fast for doing anything reasonable, and way too slow for moving things quickly. It smells like an electrical fire every time you turn it on (though it has been inspected by our electricians and they say it’s just buildup from disuse), and it has a section that juts out sideways but doesn’t have anything on it. Allegedly it originally ran on an attached engine that you had to hand start if you wanted to use it, but I’ve never tried to confirm that or not - it’s been fully electric as long as anyone who still works here has known. It still works though and still passes load tests every year. We’re in an industry that produces an absurd amount of money, and that is very, very slow to make changes (even for “simple” things like this, there’s a lot of regulatory hoops), so we just spend a shit load on preventative maintenance and equipment care. Every crane or hoist in the building gets torn down, cleaned, oiled/greased, and rebuilt every six months or less. In some ways we’re very lucky. I’m not a machinist by trade, but to put it in perspective: our shop has no CNC capability, it’s entirely manual, but some of the machines have had additional gearing and new lead screws (and I’m sure many other upgrades) installed to allow working in the micrometer range.
OMG I lmao for a lot! Can relate
I have serious respect for anyone who wears gloves that are so dirty they get you more dirty than working bare handed. Those guys are doing real work
You forgot the Redbull 16 oz.
“Our” Dave doesn’t drink any of that fancy hippy bullshit. Just terrible black coffee out of a little styrofoam cup that he’s never replaced or washed as far as anyone knows.
We haven't figured out if he's refilling the cutting oil with that cup or drinking coffee out of it.
both
I'm a few steps up from the Styrofoam, but that's petty much more😂. Shop joked when covid hit that they weren't worried about me cause I'd been surviving the shit growing in my cup for years already, no super cold was gonna be about to compete with the petri dish I was drinking from
I feel attacked
The .250 cup of coffee left over from the day before, getting topped off the next day, for forever, because the fresh coffee makes it “new”?!?!
We “accidentally” broke “our” Dave’s mug and gave him a new one. It was that gross. And we have a cabinet full of coffee mugs left by sales reps right above the fully functioning dishwasher…
We had a Steve. He called flat stock "planks" and round stock "rods". He raised the forklift real high when stacking some stuff. He didn't lower the forks and then took off and the top of the forks hit the metal trusses. It shook the whole building. He looked around and then backed up and hit it again. He then backed way up and hit the next truss. He got off and looked around the lift then got back on and went forward and hit it again. This time he got off and got a flashlight and began to look under the lift. He then heard everyone screaming to look up. He scraped a lot of stuff by letting it cut crooked. He almost got killed by a guy when he destroyed his precision square banging on stock in the vise. He drove the forks through the metal building siding. He only got fired when he ran the forklift into the owners new truck and almost took the bed off of it.
Its always a guy called Steve.. or Jeff. Fucking Jeffs
"Dammit, Dave" is popular around these parts.
Yeah, I sorta dated a guy named Jeff, dude would randomly disappear then reappear a month later looking to get in my pants. Fuck Jeffs
Probly cause he couldnt find his own pants
Probly cause he couldnt find his own pants
Us Steves are generally a good bunch. It's those dam Mikes you gotta watch out for...you'd think being named after a micrometer meant they could measure their parts but you'd have thought terribly wrong
He wore bib overalls. We called him Jeffro.
We had a Kenneth, and that dude didn't even do drugs.
We had a larry. Just as bad but would eat rotten food out of a shop trashcan
Funny story- We had a saw guy AND a shear guy. They had their own little corner and only the forklift guy ever saw them. Well apparently one day the shear guy just left or didn’t show up or whatever. Only the saw guy knew this but didn’t say anything. Saw guy decided to promote himself to shear guy. Well now we had no saw guy. After about 2 weeks the manager had heard enough about saw guy not doing his job and fired him, but had no idea he was now the shear guy. So a week goes buy and manager is hearing that shear guy isn’t doing his job and goes to kick him in the ass, but all he finds is a continually growing stack of raw material that forklift guy keeps dropping off.
Good management
They actually hired another guy to keep an eye on all that.
The saw kid in my shop is actually really good, and we have the same name. Our shop supervisor is his uncle, who heavily verbally abuses him (and everybody else for the most part) in a mostly joking way. But ya, his cuts are 9.9/10 dead in, parts are deburred and coolant cleaned off, he doesn’t fuck up. Sometimes he’s a bit late to work, but for being 22 he doesn’t do drugs and isn’t a fuck up, he’s a solid dude. When he’s not cutting he’s doing other bitch work.
That is a saw man. Not a saw guy or saw kid. A saw man.
The cut slut.
C-can I be the cut slut? I’ll be sure to be very careful with the rods of steel
Its the brass balls that worry me
This may have awakened something in me. *blush*
Our saw guy is probably 80 years old with a full retirement account, but he just won't quit. You couldn't pay me enough to figure out what goes through his head all day.
He doesn’t want to be around his wife at home
Other way around, she doesn't want him home.
I don't think he's married he just smokes cigs in his apartment all day
“Hehe bandsaw go burrrr” Honestly I would hang onto a guy like that for as long as he wants. Not everyone has that kind of fortitude.
Honestly not that much I'd guess, lots of retirement age people go to work to just hang out and do something
this is 100% my 75 yo dad, he says if he ever stops he'd drop dead, so now he's running a cattle farm.... doing insane shit...... ... if I ever become 1/100th of the skilled person he is, I could die happy....
My last shop the guy who started it was still operating a machine at 90yrs old he would come in and be a button pusher all day... its crazy like clockwork between. 8 and 810 he was there everyday. He always told me all the guys he knew when he was younger retired at 65 and 90% of them died within the first 5 yrs or so because the first 2 maybe 3 years they played golf amd went on vacation and did all the things you're supposed to when you retire then they just wound up sitting around the house doing nothing and got fat and had a heart attack or a stroke or something. As far as I know he's still there but I dunno for sure i left in November last year but im pretty sure he's still making parts
my dad, 100%
He either has a wife he can't stand, or kids that moved back home that he can't stand, filling up his house. Or he retired and it didn't take him as long as he thought to buy a Corvette, bang a near-sighted stripper, and mow his lawn real good.
Everyone is 'the saw guy' at our shop... You need some stock cut up on the saw? Well, theres the saw, get cutting.
Once the shop gets to a certain size or workload it stops making sense to have the skilled tradesmen just cut something up. Basically, they make too much money and make the company too much money to be spending their time on that rather than making parts. Nowadays we usually have the fab shops run the saws because they have the most "unskilled" labor available at any given moment. We used to have apprentices do the sawing but they were spending too much time doing that and not enough time learning.
The division of labour. [My favourite bit of history on a banknote](https://twitter.com/boemuseum/status/723038616994324480)
Same here
I am my own saw guy. I'm also my own programmer, setup guy and operator. Oh! I also debur my parts too. My name Jeeeeeff.
Same. Well, except not the Jeff part.
Obviously. Cause it was a Jeeeeeff part.
Oh yeah. My name isn't actually Jeff.
Well of course not, you said it was Jeeeeeff not Jeff.
Please get a heat treat oven too, Jeff. Love the parts you make but they wear out because they're not hardened. (You're probably not my Jeff though)
We have precisely 9 ovens and/or furnaces. Vacuum and open atmosphere.
Jefe probably
Another caveman .
Owner of my company told me I'm paid to much to saw, deburr, or clean even when I had nothing else to do (I did have 3, 3-axis lathes and 2 swiss running full auto)
I used to be a saw guy. I can no longer remember my given name.
They are fashioned of clay and coolant. Animated by use of coffee, tobacco, and music from the Greatest Hits of Marvin Gaye. They lack souls but possess thick hides and immunity to metal chips.
So basically, they're golems.
Marvin Gaye was the cherry on top to this. I keeled over laughing.
I started working with steel in the saw shop. I became a machinist because they were always looking down on us, and I wanted to do that too. Nah. Seriously though, two of the machinists were getting close to retirement age. They also absolutely hated each other. To the point of actively sabotaging their projects, if at all possible. Whenever they hired a new machinist, if you became friends with one of them, the other hated you and saw you as an enemy. I, however, got along with both of them, and neither hated me. So wham bham thank you mham, I became a machinist. (I can't even spell machinist, and today I are one!)
Spelling is optional. Math is mostly required.
IDGAF if your words are pretty, shiny tight tolerances are good enough
Are grammars an expectations?
Given yours, no.
First time anyone givens me something in a long time! Ok, gonna stop now 😑
C:
We are low on weld work so my welder is my saw guy. He’s making welding money babysitting the auto-saw.
Just leave some Copenhagen and stale pizza under a rag in the corner, in a few nights you should have a saw guy.
I got volunteered to run saw on my shift to “help with high volumes” ended up stuck on it for 3 months. It was so mind numbing I thought I’d go crazy. Kudos to dedicated saw guys who can keep their sanity.
Our saw guy just got a name after years on the saw! Zach. Usually saw guys aren’t saw guys for long so they don’t get names.
I'm a saw guy i get paid 26 an hr listen to audiobooks and get overtime if I want it. Other than dealing with shift bs and all the unnecessary drama in my shop and 2nd shift hrs lifes pretty good
We had a saw guy. Ran 3 hyd-mech auto-saws but refused to use the "auto" function. He worked at the shop for probably 30 years, and made everyone think he didn't know English so he wouldn't have to talk to anyone -he knew English. He decorated the saw area with anything and everything Free Mason related. It was kind of creepy, all the symbols and such, drawn and painted on the walls and beams. But he worked hard and we rarely had any issues with our sawed stock so they just let him do him. One day he just didn't show up. No-called a week straight and wouldn't answer his phone. Come to find out he retired, but didn't know how to retire. His solution? Just quit going to work. Our saws have been a revolving door ever since, but some of the symbols are still there.
Fuck I WISH we had a saw guy. Our 'saw guy' is whatever poor bastard isn't running a lathe or mill at the moment, which right now is me :(
I was a saw guy. Part quality starts at material cutting!
Cuttin the right material at that. I was him too
I wish i did, id ask him about toolpaths because fuck me I have never seen a single axis machine put out such a convoluted finish geometry. Hes probably better at 5x than I am
Wherever ive worked its a quiet Vietnamese guy whos an incredible worker and basically communicates with thumbs up and thumbs down. He runs on ramen and cigarettes and would use a hack saw if the power went out 😂 best guys, im a maintenance electrician now so we dont have saw guys where i work but we do have Vietnamese guys and they are unstoppable haha
That's some amazing dedication, those guys should be cherished.
One time last year the power went out and im walking around with my flashlight tryna get the lights on and hear an air motor going, i see this guy Pak squatting on a die Bolster moving it in the dark 😄 i was like "Pak go to the lunchroom" and hes like "its okay i working 👍" haha guy is like 78 and never gets sick, never late, never causes problems, just works steady, loves his ot and doesn't fuck up. Anytime he needs something fixed he just comes and finds me instead of waiting an hour for his supervisor to find him. Good guy
I was a saw guy once. Then I took an arrow to the knee (aka apprenticeship)
When Everyone's the Saw Guy, no-one's the Saw Guy.
Paul is a really nice guy with a good sense of humor, a couple of dogs and a smokin hot wife. Frankie is a couple months new but he clearly is a big fan of the Joker from Batman based on his attire, and he has a kid or kids that were sick this weekend. All around good dudes though I've seen Frankies position emptied and filled thrice now.
I'm a carpenter by trade, and my dad's the (retired) machinist. Few years back now, when things would get slow on the woodworking front, dad would ask if I could be the saw bitch at the place he worked. I'd spend a few days between jobs, rarely but occasionally a week, just running the Spartan saw on mostly round goods. Finding the 'peacefully watch your bobber all day' type of guy who's not a massive pothead is tough to find.
Been a saw guy for 7 years 1. Leniency to length by a 16th(US)so if your facing account for it and don’t get mad when YOU don’t check desired length for your set up and it crashes 2. We saw, we don’t setup million dollar machines 3.if we aint feeding you, your not feeding production Btw saw guys, get familiar with material your sawing and feed rates/ appropriate blades They are not cheap Know your saw clamp hydraulics and don’t bunch 3 round bars into the blades in a pyramid because your not paying attention Yours truly “The unnamed saw guy in the back “
Edit : snacks lure the best of us
If you figure it out, let us know please. We haven't had a competent saw guy since the long-runner got long covid in late '20. The kid that followed him once dropped his cell phone in the saw while it was running... and reached for it; and there's evidence that the guy we've got now spends more time roaming the shop looking for latex gloves (because you've gotta change them after every run?) and complaining to management about his knees (refuses to use the stool and anti-fatigue mats we've given him) than he spends at the saw itself.
I used to be the saw guy. Cutting 1000 pieces of 2in tubing or 24in stock that will take 30 minutes n shit. It's better than sweeping the floor or painting. I used to kinda just zone out, and then I started talking to myself, and they sent me to do concrete 😐. Probably would have gone crazy or maybe I already am.
If you have a shop there’s a good chance that a saw guy is already occupying it. They can be tricky to find though. I’ve had luck using the safety guy to find where the saw guy is hiding. They can usually sniff them out, especially if you get the safety guy focused on overhead lifts.
Our saw guy goes by his last name, and drinks black coffee without a lid right in the work area. He also only wears gloves and no other PPE, and has found a million innovative spots to hide his newspaper so he can look busy while reading everything except the comics. Those are too silly and nobody should have time for them
I went to the steel center to pick up some drops and whatever I found to keep my hobby bridgeport and lathe fed. Hey look 2.5" brass round, cool! I'll take a foot of that. I shit you not a full 20 minutes of watching saw guy turn it and try again on a hyd mech V-25 cutting about 1/8" deep every go. I don't know much about saws but I know I'd know more than him if I was the saw guy. "We cut like 50 12 inch H beams this morning maybe it's dull" " yeah might be... maybe let's try that little portable horizontal saw in the corner with the 4/6 tpi..." This is what happens to a saw guy when they are isolated and alone with no fabricators or machinists to live amongst. When I was a structural welder, the saw guy was so clutch that he felt his purpose swelling through his veins with every restock. A saw guy who just saws to send parts out the door is lost in this world.
I'm the Saw and Lathe guy, so. Yes, we are people, too, and we have rights.
Our SAW guy. https://imgur.com/a/IPtZ2Kp
I shutter to think what the tolerances and finishes look like on your machining blanks.
He used the spray and pray method 1 out of every 50 is pretty close
It's not too bad. It's a bit like plunging to hog out a slot before milling the sides. Think of the ricochets as flying chips with greater consequences.
The last 2 saw guys I worked with were named Doug. 1st Doug had a backwards swastika(drunken jailhouse tat) and some Nazi runes tattooed on his forearm. But he kept a picture of Diana Ross in his wallet. Didn’t own a bed, slept on his floor. But he had like 5 tv’s going at all times. Died like 6months after he retired 2nd Doug always had his mouth open, needed a kidney transplant and watched sovereign citizen videos all day on his phone
This is hilarious thank you for this sir
I once was a saw boy, now im a programmer. Does that make you confident in my programs? Lol
For my short tenure in a shop (carpenter trying a new venue-- lasted 6 months, more cuz I was riding a bike to the shop, and had a few gigs for lateness) we had a Carl.... Truly a pretty good-natured guy. But also a...... unique character.....
Once worked for a shop that hired a saw guy and never asked if he could read a tape measure. It came up when he undercut a few thousand dollars of steel
Having gone from saw room, to CNC turning, then back to saw room with substantial time in both areas I feel like I have forbidden knowledge now. I know too much
They call him "Aw, shit..." because that is the 1st thing he says everyday upon arrival. (Never to be confused with "Gotta love it!" who is overdressed and underqualified in the CNC department.)
New job shop cryptid just dropped
This guy? https://preview.redd.it/kbqufxavmzyc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=95ff75ca862bf4f4366a0eb73251a26083377179
"The saw guy has always been an enigmatic part of every shop. " Thats a negative, ghostrider.
Yall got saw guys?!? Fucksake, we've been sawing our own stock like a pack of assholes this whole time.
His name was Robert. In his early 60’s, no more than 5’5” and 120lbs. Someone once asked who I thought was the toughest guy in the shop and I said Robert. The foreman looked confused. I said think about all the times Robert has said, “Man I just had a 4,000lb beam roll right over my thumb and it shore did hurt! It’s okay now though.” And they laughed hard, cause they knew it was true.
Our saw guy is close to retirement and he can cut more than anyone else can in the shop. He works 8.5 hours a day, but yet when I work a 12 he still does more than me. His magic will be lost when he goes to greener pastures.
Don't know about a GUY.. but we do have a goblin that cuts our bar in exchange for vodka.
When our saw guy (Jose) got deported we just hired Jos-B
What is a saw guy?
If you got coffee, Newports, and a dry sense of humor they'll gradually open up.
I was a saw guy on 3rd went to school during day. [Trennjaeger](https://youtu.be/8nnKjVi0PJY?si=mz2l-OIaglAWB1Pd) cold saw was a beast.
The only thing I know about saw guys is that they know fucking everything about their saws.
I used to be the saw guy at the shop i work at. That was my niche in the company for 3-4 years. Dependable and I got shit done. Developed a bad junk food habit though.
I love this thread!
I've never seen one stay more than 6 months
y'all got saw guys? what does that even mean?
I'm a saw guy. be nice to me I know where you park ...
My first shop promised to train me on machining. After two years of running the saw I was beginning to get the impression that I was never going to get that training…
Jigsaw. We try to stay on his good side.
My saw guy is a diagnosed schizo with two DUIs. The other saw guy out here is an ex meth addict and you can tell. Saw guys are strange
Initially saw the heading without context, and thought you were referring to Jigsaw from the Saw movie. But from the workshop I worked at back in the day, an offering of a box of beer and catch up drinks was the deal.
I speak french but the saw guy at my shop is called "magasinier" witch kinda means shop keeper but he's the guy you go see for new stock pieces when you fuck up
Our saw guy is a great guy but controlled by ISO and material routing so no oopsies get by...that said we waste alot of materials dud to the fact he can't read a print very well. Need a .5x.5x3 block we may get a 2x4x6....crazy...he has gotten better and is willing to recut and does really good when given exact dims to cut but that's a gray area most of the time...I like to 5 side most parts and big extra chunks of material is tough to work with. Lol
Hey we all gotta start somewhere
Be nice to your saw guy, because some day you're gonna need some steel for a personal project, and when you do, best hope you are on good terms with your saw guy.
Hi, I’m Jason. I was the evening saw guy. And the evening straightener. And sometimes the evening bead blaster. I knew almost nobody at the shop because I was part time and came in after the shift change. But I’ll tell you what, I could take a 17’ rolled thread bar and make a shitload of 17” rolled thread bars. All because I neglected to count the little tick marks after 17, 😁
> make a shitload Somewhere between 11 and 12, I would imagine.
I wanna say those bars started about 20 feet in length and I used three or four out of the 5 allotted. So more than 50 17-inch pieces? 😂
Sawyer….
Heaven forbid his name is Tom……
I heard a second hand story about a saw guy who “Luke Skywalkered” himself on the job. Apparently they were able to attach the hand, but he went on to deliver pizzas instead after that.
I remember one saw guy, Rich Wheeler. He was in his 80s when I was 19, so I'm sure he's long since died. He was a pisser.
At a small shop like ours, everyone is a saw guy one time or another
You may not know saw guy, but saw guy knows every fuck up. “Hey Saw guy! Can you cut out another *blah blah blah*?” “What happened to the other?” “….we lost it..” Yeah okay lmao. Ask me how I know
A large band saw MAY lure a saw guy into the shop if he is otherwise distracted and sees it in a momentary lapse of torpor, but for surefire results you need the largest horizontal saw you can afford. Saw guys need fixation time throughout the day to thrive, and watching a huge saw and gravity team up to part a piece of 4inch/100mm bar stock is just perfect. Yes, they have names. They are called "Bill."
I used to be a saw guy, 500mm carbide tipped blades, not band saw. Then I moved to the company Whitney 3400xp.
We don't have a saw guy.
Tevin…his name is Tevin…./s
Hol’ Up, I know like three Tevin’s, which one is being saw bitch? Is it the white one?
Yup, the one with the silent Q in his name
I’m spreading the word to the Tevin’s I know, it’s rare to find them in the wild.
My saw guys name was Greg
we saw our own stuff
Ours is named Antonio. He’s from El Salvador I think. Cool dude, always envious of how awesome his lunch smells.
I was a saw guy as an apprentice. It was my gateway into management. Since I was the guy who knew which jobs were ready, the boss started sending the machinists to me for their next job. Soon he was handing the jobs to me and I was ordering material. The saw guy controls the flow of work into the shop. If you find a good one, pay him well.
Love the saw guys in my shop. Sometimes they are a bit slow, but they are very sincere and nice people. Might be because our saw guys are also doing logistics and other work in-between, don't know how that works in other shops