The place where the oven doors for our ranges are made consists of about 12 people. I went to this area on Tuesday. When I first began working at our plant in 1997 I worked on a doorline. I didn’t mind working there. I stayed there for two years. I enjoyed relearning everything. It’s a feels good to pull up a memory of how you thought and how your hands worked to accomplish something from 9 years ago!

One of the positions is called roping. You must place an insulated rope around the large glass window on the oven door. A piece of tempered glass is placed on the backside of the part of the door that will face inside the oven when the door is closed. The backside is facing up on our small assembly line. Then you take a premeasured piece of rope and carefully place in under the glass around the lip edge of the window. (Sorry, this stuff can get so technical that it may be hard to follow.) You’ll have enough rope if you leave two unused inches in the corner of the window at the start. What I liked about this job is that it requires a touch of craftsmanship. As you pull the rope around the window do not pull it tight. If it is too tight the upper left corner could have rope showing through the window. Then you place a metal frame over your roped glass. And then another piece of tempered glass is placed on top of the metal frame.
You must make sure the rope is fully tucked in under the metal frame. A good “roper” won’t have to tuck in the rope after it has been placed on the first time. If you have to tuck in several ropes you will get the line behind. This is not good. Roping was fun for me. I remember several years ago enjoying it and once again I was enjoying it.
Most of the area was the same and I could easily keep up. I have to give the doorline team some credit. There are two jobs where you must blindly put in a screw from underneath. You have to get “a feel” for doing this. Putting the door on the range was the same way. Since I worked in this area the hinges have changed and I couldn’t place the door on as I had in the past. Two or three people showed me and they gently put it on with total ease. I had to bang with the palm of my hand to get it in the correct position. That’s okay, I’ll get it.
The team consisted of all guys, a few younger and a few older and one young girl. They all joked around with each other. It’s sad to say, but as is typical in “guy areas” there was a lot of swearing going on with words I really didn’t want to hear. But I liked the lightheartedness of the team. For all those guys, this was an easy job and in order to pass the boring time they would say annoying things to each other. And then there would be a comeback by the targeted person.
There was also singing. When a job gets real boring, you come to a point where you don’t care as much what people think and you just bellow out some tune that’s been running through your head for awhile. Damon did this, ever so often over the roar of factory noise I could hear him sing “Wo-wo-wo!” (More dramatic when not in print.)
Unlike every other team on our assembly line, the guys on the team had to get their own supplies. They had treated their material supplier rudely thus they had to fend for themselves. This could become a problem for me as a ranger but one of the guys said he would help me if I didn’t have time to run to get supplies.