A Day at the Grease Plant
placesjournal.org
placesjournal.org
This was a small operation, only three steel buildings if I remember right, built on the owner’s land beside his house in a small town in east central Texas where there was great highway access to an interstate but no real regulatory interference. Out there you could, and still can, do anything you want to do without the threat of your neighbors hauling you to court. Having just made it through my teens without too many issues I took a temporary job there to earn money for a long horseback trip I was planning to take in the fall.
This job paid minimum wage though I don't remember what that was back in 1980. All the work was performed by the 4-5 employees including myself and our efforts were guided by regular phone calls from the employer who watched from his air-conditioned living room and made sure we weren't fucking the dog (another common term for dilly-dallying) on his time or anything like that.
The grease that we made needed to be able to lubricate pipe threads that were already wet with drilling mud so it had to stick like glue to anything, even if it was submerged when you applied it. We made several products, each designed for different mud types and temperature maximums.
One of my high school 'friends' helped me get the job since he knew the owner from the local beer joints where we all hung out, before the owner tied up with a beautiful fundamentalist Christian gal who made him quit drinking and start spreading the word about his savior Jesus. There was also a Mexican man, an undocumented immigrant. This man left Mexico like many of his countrymen to come north and earn higher wages than he could at home so he could better support his family, all of whom stayed behind.
The pipe dope grease was mixed in batches based on customer orders in a large vat with large mixing paddles just as the grease was mixed by the men in the article. Like the process described in the article we used a recipe for each specific type of grease that we produced. First you would empty multiple 55 gallon barrels of axle grease into the vat. Follow that with a quantity of 90W gear oil and blend that until it was smooth. Then you would add the dry ingredients that gave the grease its special properties. Multiple 5-gallon buckets of powdered graphite, molybdenum, copper, and lead, followed by bags of lime and then you would go to the 55-gallon barrel of raw benzene and measure the required amount and add it as the paddles churned all this together. Then you would dispense all this into 2 gallon or 5 gallon buckets based on the size of the order to be filled.
Of course all that powdered material required use of a specific type of mask if you followed OSHA regulations. The benzene required special handling and use of gloves. The masks that were provided were definitely not up to the task of protecting anyone from inhaling stuff that been powdered so finely and the wind blowing through the open doors in the mixing building guaranteed that the dust got on and in everything. Even the lead dust could be seen billowing up as you poured. The worst was the benzene though. It was just a barrel with an ordinary hand pump that one could use to dispense a measured amount into a container held in a hand. The signage on the barrel made it clear that this shit was not to be trifled with and emphasized that it caused cancer. I had already worked a couple years in the oil field so I knew about that anyway since a number of the leases where I worked had signage warning of benzene. My Mexican coworker though did not have the advantage of a mastery of English or any experience with hazardous chemicals. The first time I had to be the guy who pumped the benzene he took me to the barrel and using his broken English, showed me how to measure the exact amount. As he did this he made sure that I knew to put on the one pair of gloves that had been provided by the employer so that I would be somewhat protected from splashes.
He did this because no one had shown him any of this or described any of the risks or hazards when he started and they only informed him after he had splashed a large amount on his forearm while filling the receptacle. He thought nothing of it until it blistered, became raw and oozing, and refused to heal. He showed me the large open sore on his arm, months old by then but still quite fresh because he wanted me to be able to avoid getting burned as he had.
I look back now after more than 40 years and I still hope that this man was able to escape that job and find a better employer, a better life somewhere else. With his mobility limited by his immigration status his options were not good in that area during that time period.
Anyway, this got long and I already deleted a lot of the original tale. I wanted to give a first-person perspective of grease-blending and those who actually do the work. I was only in this job for a few weeks because I had a falling-out with the owner. I had to use a forklift to move a few pallets of dope from the building where we mixed and filled the buckets over to the loading ramp where it was loaded on the float trailer for delivery. While I was rolling past one of the buildings I ran over an extension cord that the owner had strung from that building out into the yard right across the path he knew I would have to travel. As I bounced over the cord I saw this asshole lose his religion long enough to loudly blame me for destroying his $5 cord. He called me everything that I had already decided by that time in life that I would not allow anyone to call me, including stupid, and so as I sat in that forklift seat and let him wind down I made up my mind that I was done. I hopped off of the seat and walked to my truck, cranked it up and did a nice doughnut in his yard and hauled my ass out of there.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I read the article and felt a need to tell this tale.
its also as I've experienced it kinda unrefined? it stinks, smells like turpentine sometimes and is a royal bitch to clean off parts. we don't use it anymore but you can still buy new old stock.
if you burn the wax version to remove it, it emits a choking white smoke. most cosmolene can't be used in high speed applications, and has no friction modifiers like copper or lithium.
just to add, the standard cleaning procedure is mineral spirits or xylene, which creates a toxic waste that most recyclers flat out do not accept. you have to take it to a specialty chemical disposal company.
[1] https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015068120040?urlappend=%3B... - Popple, C. Sterling. (1952). Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) in World War II. New York: Standard Oil Co. (N.J.). Pages 119-120.
[2] http://www.royalpioneercorps.co.uk/rpc/history_compound.htm -- "Taken from The Royal Pioneer, Issue No 40, September 1954"
And [2] promises that answer. Before reading that, I was thinking some mechanic, or perhaps a farm hand turned logistics sergeant, had to see the problem and know that a special type of grease was the answer. Then, how to communicate that up the chain, when the bosses might not know about engines in that way?
I feel this is the struggle of innovation, repeated once more but in a literal life and death context.
I’d love to know more about that part of the story.
>Eisenhower requested a special kind of grease to help enable an amphibious attack on Sicily. On May 31, the Standard Oil Development Company (SODC), the technical hub of Standard Oil of New Jersey, where experiments and testing were centralized, received instructions to create a scalable formula so that delivery of the grease could happen within one week. SODC succeeded and SONJ began producing the lubricant in its Baltimore plant on June 2.
leading to many days in the grease plant like the one documented.
That's major milestones for you, the old fashioned way.
There's something about the way you can maintain readiness with decades of experiments & testing under one hat, on the same rare equipment.
That, right there, is a special kind of moxie.
It would be interesting to compare these photos with how executives at SONJ were living at the time.
Mr President (FDR) knew full well as he had instituted an oil embargo on Japan in July 1941.