6. Never thaw dynamite in front of the fire, or on a hot stone removed from a fire, or by piling sticks in a boiler or in an oven.
By order of,
Richard T. Dana, General Manager.
In hauling earth, the principal elements of team expense are the time to haul and the standing still to load. This last item can be very materially reduced by the simple expedient of having on the work an extra wagon or two. A team can be changed from one wagon to another in about one and a-half minutes, and the same number of teams on a short haul will do easily 15 per cent more work by this trick.
The same principle applies to the mixing of concrete involving extra wheelbarrows; and here it may be mentioned that the arrangement of the concrete platform is seldom economical. The men, if left to themselves, will usually not have sufficient runways, so that a man with a loaded wheelbarrow will be painfully struggling up a plank, while a man with an empty wheelbarrow is waiting for him to get out of the way. Much can be accomplished by having the men move in procession so that no man with a wheelbarrow will ever have to stand and wait for another man to get out of his way. Of course the ideal method of handling concrete into a mixer is to do it from bins with chutes; but the great majority of this class of work is not done in this manner.
On contract work, the emergency charges for the moving of plant are usually considerably higher than they ought to be, owing to the fact that the work is done by men who are not especially skilful in this kind of work. The direction of these processes should be given to a man who is especially good at it; and the work should be provided with a good supply of gin poles, snatch blocks, tackle, etc.
If a piece of work has been under personal observation for considerable time, a great many sources of improvement in the performance can be detected that are entirely invisible upon casual inspection; and the student of economics is urged to devote a large amount of time to the most careful and complete study of minor and apparently trivial operations. Too much respect is usually given to established methods, just because they are established methods; and the analysis of a process that is apparently simple and of minor importance, but which is repeated scores of times in a day, is nearly always given too little importance as compared with the process that is elaborate and complicated, and which may in itself be of great importance, but which, on the particular work at hand, is dependent upon apparently minor processes. To illustrate—A shovel, loading eight or nine thousand yards of rock per month, was inspected; and the first impression obtained was that the reason the shovel output was so small was because of the inefficient layout of the shovel work itself. It was found, however, that the shovel was actually able to work a good deal faster than the drills and the blasting could provide broken rock for it; and the ultimate solution of the problem was found in the reorganizing of the drilling, in order to do more work with the same number of drills, and in the use of improved methods in blasting. The handling of the shovel took care of itself as soon as the other problems were solved.
The cost of spreading broken macadam on a road, to the average contractor, is not far from 12 cents per cubic yard; and the work is done with shovels and forks. This method is one that has been pursued for a great many years; and there are very few contractors who realize that it is exceedingly expensive. Some contractors, however, are doing work of this kind with the aid of a road machine that requires for its operation two or three men and four horses. A small grader machine that can be operated by one man and two horses for rough spreading, assisted by one man on the ground with a potato hook, has been known to do this work for about 2 cents or less per cubic yard.
In bridge-erecting work, a great deal of money can be saved over ordinary methods by the designing of special tools, such as dolly bars; and a good system of keeping detailed cost on such work will be sure to result advantageously. Much labor is lost in the erecting of roof trusses and in the erection of trusses in general, by crude and old-fashioned methods. The pneumatic riveter which strikes a great many light blows per minute has revolutionized field riveting; but the use of such a machine for cutting rivets has been unsuccessful in competition with hand labor on at least one large piece of work in New York City.
In painting, considerable time is ordinarily lost by the painters in preparing their own staging. Whenever possible, these preparations should be done for them under the direction of a skilled man; and the use of small winches on the staging whereby the painters can quickly raise and lower themselves, has been found of great value.