When We Were Young

Posted by stephens on Jun 1, 2009 in About, Tips & Techniques | 0 comments

When I hired into General Motors as a die design apprentice in 1986, we were bred to be contractors from the moment we walked into the K-1 Lobby at CPC Headquarters, the former Fisher Body building.

Within weeks of completing our 1,500 hour basic training, many of us in the group of 12 were moonlighting die design work. My design company was called Stamping Technologies, Inc., or STI for short.

A typical week looked like this:

Monday

• General Motors: 11 hours die design
• Lawrence Tech: 6 hours class time
• STI: 1 hour deliver progressive die design package

Tuesday

• General Motors: 11 hours die design
• Macomb College: 6 hours class time
• STI: 1 hour creating progressive die strip layout

Wednesday

• General Motors: 11 hours die design
• Lawrence Tech: 6 hours class time
• STI: 1 hour finishing progressive die strip layout

Thursday

• General Motors: 11 hours die design
• Macomb College: 6 hours class time
• STI: 1 hour finish and submit progressive die design quote package

Friday

• General Motors: 11 hours die design
• STI: 7 hours progressive die design

Saturday

• STI: 18 hours progressive die design

Sunday

• STI: 17 hours progressive die design

The total work week was 125 hours. It stacked up like this:

• 55 hours day job
• 24 hours college
• 46 hours moonlighting

We did this week in and week out for several years. There were two key things we did to achieve this level of performance:

• Trained our bodies to go without sleep
• Created an engineering system to “put the lines down once”

Over two decades later, I still find myself working those extended hours. I work anywhere from 28 to 40 hours straight before taking time off. When we were young, we would take only six hours off. Now, I have to take twice that time off to recover.