04-29-2010, 09:46 AM
Steamtrains Wrote:The chain is squirrelier than a wet bar of soap, and trying to insert the pin into the hole on the tender floor is next to impossible. So....does anybody know how this miracle was accomplished in the first place..?? Are the Chinese endowed with some quality I'm ignorant of..?? Surely they can do it in less than two hours per pin....
It is probably that they have small hands. When I worked as a refrigeration mechanic in the harbor on container units, one of the shipping lines had a bunch of units made in Japan by Daiken. There were a few pressure switches located in places that my hand (which is long and skinny by the way) just wouldn't fit. There was just no way to replace them without some major disassembly of the machine. One day an engineer from Daiken came to the terminal to talk to us about the machines and see what we thought of them. I complained about the difficulty of working on the machine in such tight quarters. He proceeded to show me how easily he could work on everything, that there just was no problem. Of course I have never seen a woman with such tiny delicate looking hands! I then told him that they should really keep the things in orient and never allow one of the machines to go anyplace in the world where there wasn't an oriental with tiny little hands to work on it! He didn't much like hearing that!