I still needed a job so I went looking for work.  Got a job in an iron foundry on Nanaimo street in Vancouver. This was the old fashioned foundry I had learned about. The place was filled with smoke from the hot iron. The metal was carried by two guys. They would position the pot over the mold and slowly pour the iron into it.

Fortunately my background in foundry work allowed me to get the less stressful job of making cores. Cores where the sand innards of a piece. Like the inside of a cup or bottle. They were destroyed after the pour and the sand mold was chopped up. The inside core couldn’t be removed and used again. It had to be broken up. Hence my endless job.  It was an early morning job and while driving to work I would pick up a couple of guys who had no cars.

The workers were practically all East Indians which made lunch time lonely as I didn’t know the language. They were a good crowd and tried to tempt me with their food. (Some kind of gruel which they ate with their hands) no thanks.

I had a helper and he would supply me with the sand and took away the finished work. Unfortunately the bosses decided that they needed the cores first thing so moved my sign in time to 6 o’clock. I could do it but regretted missing out on my evening enjoyment. Not good enough they decided 2 o’clock was a better time for me to start. You can guess what happened next. I quit!

Got pretty good at quitting jobs after that.

Ed, a most enjoyable fellow worker.

One of the guys working there who I became  friends with was the general handyman. He knew everything about the foundry and taught me a lot. He had a great hobby. Flying machines towed by cars! I went out to the airport in the valley once to see what it was all about. Fascinating.

Ed (the Handyman]

Those of my fellow workers who disliked me played all sorts of tricks on me so that my work would be shoddy and could get me fired. (which is what they wanted). I couldn’t get the molds right and was getting mighty depressed when the foreman came by and asked me why wasn’t I doing such and such before making the work? I said I’d never heard of this requirement. He gave the teachers shit. After this I began producing good stuff.

After the molds had been poured they spent a while cooling off before they were broken up. They were dumped on a vibrating screen which took the sand downstairs and left the metal objects to be washed and cleaned. Dirty work.

The foundry was modern and worked mainly in aluminum with the occasional foray into bronze or brass. I was clean and well ventilated. I mention this because after this foundry closed I found a job in another foundry. Iron and old hat. The hot metal was poured by hand and the place existed on one floor with sand an dust everywhere. Outside was a giant pile of iron-bathtubs, old cars, junk of all sort. But that’s another story.

One thing that was common in both foundries was the Furnaceman. He had to work near stupendous heat all day long. Starting work he would put on his work clothes. They were, from the start,  burnt and torn with splashes of metal. Skinny and undernourished it affected his mind as well. The furnace men that I worked with were always on the edge of lunacy. Sometimes this came out as anger (nobody would challenge a furnace man) but mostly non-stop talking. Sentences that didn’t make any sense.

To some of the workers there I was known as the boss’s kid and they resented that. They tried to trip me up whenever possible. After I started working in the machine shop they’re opportunities almost disappeared. However, at lunch I was the recipient of endless jibes. It got quite tiresome. Once when we ran out of work machining I was detailed to work with these guys making molds. As I said before, the sand came from up above and all you had to do was shake it into the molds. The molds were pretty simple. You filled two halves, one bottom, one top, and put the facsimile between them. then you pressed the two halves together with a kind of hydraulic machine. You opened them, removed the object and sprayed the tops of both halves with something that would harden. These were left to dry for an hour or so before the metal was poured.