From 1977 to 1983 I worked in a number of machine shops in the Bay Area. These photos, taken in 1982 or thereabouts, are from the time I worked at Allied Engineering in Alameda.
Here I am at a horizontal boring mill at Allied Engineering probably drilling the bolt hole pattern for this big pump housing. These photos are all from 1982 more or less.
The shop had a professional photographer take pictures for an advertising brochure. This is the main hall. I'm the moving figure circled at the left. I worked on at least a hundred of the big valve bodies shown in front of the machine.
A view from the other end of the main hall. I'm running the overhead crane, in the background at the left.
The whole crew including the boss, the foreman, and the office staff, lined up on the big vertical lathe.
Almost all the machines in this shop were from Eastern Europe. Most of the horizontal boring mills were Varnsdorfs, made in Czechoslovakia (when that existed).
Here I am at one of the small Varnsdorf mills.
Here I am at lunch on a dock on the estuary. The Park Street Bridge is in the background.
My fellow worker ran this big vertical lathe.
Frank (if I remember correctly) had worked at Allied for a decade and knew everything there was to know.
Allied also had a welding shop, where this young man worked. He was into body building.
The two male friends on the side worked in Building 77, the machine shop at the Berkeley Rad Lab above the Cal campus, where I worked for a while. The friend in the center worked at Allied. Photo taken outside my apartment door on McKinley Avenue in Oakland.
I assembled some machine shop cast-offs for this abstract composition. Fabco is one of the shops where I worked for a while.
Another abstract composition with machine shop pieces.
This is a bicycle rim hung with various kinds of chips from the machine shops. I loved this piece and was sorry when it was ruined in a move.