I stayed on to train him

The Bridgeport in the back corner is a Series One with the step pulley head, and my dad bought it used in 1972 off a shop in Sharon that was going under. It's got about four thousandths of backlash in the X now. Everybody who walks in here tells me that's a reason to scrap it and it isn't. You come up on the number from the same side every time and take the slack out on the way in.

The machine out front does that part for you and it cost eighty-six thousand dollars. I'm not against it. I'm saying the old one will still hold a tenth. You just can't rush the last pass.

Ray bought the place off my dad in June of 2019. He'd sold his half of a mechanical outfit up by Cranberry and he told me that first week he was done sitting in a car five days a week. He was forty-six. He knew what a drill press was and that was about the end of it. I was supposed to be here ninety days.

First thing I taught him wasn't the mill, it was how to read Kaminsky's prints. Kaminsky drew every one of those in 1981 and never revised a thing, so you have to know which numbers on there are wrong. Ray wanted to call him about it. I said Kaminsky's been dead eleven years and the prints are still what we cut to.

Then tramming. You put an indicator in the spindle and sweep the head front to back and side to side until it reads zero both ways, and if you skip it you'll cut a step into somebody's part and spend two hours wondering who did that to you. He cranked the nods down way too hard the first time and I let him.

He climb milled in the old machine his third month. The backlash grabbed the cutter and it took a half inch end mill off at the shank, and it put a gouge in the table about the size of a thumbnail. That mark's still in there.

He can hold four tenths in a bore now if nobody's standing over him. Took about two years. Most people who buy a shop never learn to run anything in it. They hire it out and get beat on quotes. I've watched two places on this end of town go that way.

The phone in the office rings twice before it'll pick up and it's done that since before Ray got here. We get our taps out of a place in Erie now because the guy ships next day and he'll take one back if it snaps. The coolant we're running smells like a basement if it sits over a long weekend. Ray keeps saying he's switching back to the other stuff and he hasn't.

My mother's eighty-four and I live in the house I grew up in, which is hers, up off Shields. She makes paprikash on Sundays and every single Sunday she asks me why I'm working for another man in my father's shop. I tell her it's the same work. She goes on eating.

My dad got two hundred and ten thousand and a boat out of that sale and he lived four more years after it. I don't know what she wants out of me on it.

I've been skinny my whole life. People ask me at the eye doctor if I'm sick. I'm not sick. I eat as much as anybody and I've weighed the same since I was twenty-two.

Around the second year Ray started putting a sandwich on the bench next to me at noon. He doesn't say anything about it. He sets it down by the vise handle where I'll catch it with my elbow and then he goes back out front. It's from the Sparkle usually, ham with the cheese cut thick, and if I don't eat it he doesn't bring it up and the next day there's another one.

Tuesdays and Thursdays he stays after. That started in March four years ago. Cheryl does the office three days a week and those two aren't any of them.

That first Thursday he'd already run the part before I came back in from the lot, so there wasn't a reason for me to be there. He shut the overheads off and we were in the office maybe twenty minutes. Then he went home and I set up the morning job, because it was a 4140 fixture plate and it wanted a different cutter than what was sitting in the holder.

I started keeping a clean shirt in my locker after that.

Cheryl runs the books. She's had the same handwriting the whole time I've known her and she still writes my hours out in a ledger before she keys them in, which nobody has asked her to do in twenty years. My name's on a check she cuts every other week.

She came back on a Thursday once, in November, because she'd left her reading glasses in the desk. She let herself in the front and said hello to the both of us. The glasses were in the drawer where she thought they'd be. Then she asked me if I wanted the rest of a coffee cake that was out in her car. I said no thanks. She said suit yourself and drove off, and Ray went back to deburring the lot he was deburring.

We nearly lost the place in 2021. The valve company down in Salem that was forty percent of our work got bought, and the new people moved all of it to a shop in Kentucky, and for about five months Ray was paying me out of his own account and not paying himself. He never said anything about it. I found out from Cheryl the year after. We picked up two die shops in Warren that spring and now it's fine. The sign still says Sabo on it because those die shops wouldn't have known who else to call.

We're doing a lot of 12L14 lately and everybody looks down on it. You can run a high speed steel drill at a surface speed that would smoke 4140 and the finish comes off it clean. Ray wants to be in the stainless because it's harder and he likes the hard one. I tell him there's no money in it.

He asks me things at the end of the night that he could look up. Why the old machine likes a four flute in steel and a two flute in aluminum. Why you don't leave a part in the vise overnight in February when that wall gets cold. He knew the aluminum one three years ago.

Last Sunday my mother asked me the usual and then she asked was Ray a decent man. I said he's decent. She said well that's something, and she got up and got the dish out of the oven, and that was the whole of it.

Friday Cheryl comes in around nine with the doughnuts. She'll tell me I'm too thin, same as she does every week. She sets the box down on the bench by the mill instead of out front on the counter.