Enoch’s Thoughts

July 11, 2010

Mixing

Filed under: Uncategorized — etblog @ 7:44 pm

When I was around 14 years old, Dad, Mom, and I added two rooms and a bath to the back of our house. (I’m sure my sisters, who were 12, 7, and 4, helped too, even though my memory of their contributions is vague. But they are all hard workers today, so I’m sure they were busy helping even then.) We did all of it except the plumbing – foundation, brick skirting, framing, asbestos siding (yep, for real), roofing, flooring and paneling. I even wired it, with Dad’s cautious oversight. That was the project in which Dad taught me how to mix mortar and cement with a hoe and a wheelbarrow. I started by trying to stir the cement, aggregate, and water by using the hoe like it was a mixing spoon. Of course, the dry ingredients flew up in the air, the water sloshed over the side, and, even when I kept the ingredients inside the wheelbarrow, the dang stuff still didn’t get mixed very well.

After a couple of futile attempts, Dad finally came over and showed me how to just take a small bite with the hoe, and pull it to one end, then take another small bite, and so on, working a “row” at a time, until the ingredients were all at one end of the wheelbarrow. Then I stepped to the other end of the wheelbarrow and repeated the process. It seemed really slow at first, but soon I had a nice mixture, with all the ingredients distributed evenly.

A dozen years later I went to work for Superior Steel Fabricators, Inc., designer and builder of custom materials handling systems – bins, silos, conveyors, etc. I learned about angle of repose, pneumatic conveying, and how ingredients of different size settle at different rates, which is one of the challenges of mixing. We built one of the fastest automated ready-mix concrete plants in the country – we could batch and load a 9-yard mixer truck in 90 seconds. But perhaps our most notable achievement was a novel design for a lead oxide mixer. The President of the company was a great engineer, and he designed a stainless steel mixer with polyurethane scrapers. I built an electrical and pneumatic control system that weighed and dispensed the lead oxide, sulfuric acid, and water. OxMaster MixerWe figured out how to assemble the whole thing so it could be shipped on a single flat-bed trailer. It was a very successful product, and 25 years later, although neither the original company nor its President are still around, the OxMaster Mixer still uses almost all of our original design.

For the past few years I’ve been trying to start my day with some chopped fruit, Greek yogurt, and a generous scoop of my own breakfast concoction, usually made of raw oats, wheat bran and germ, flax seed, chopped pecans, walnuts, raw almonds, and raisins. Whenever I mix the concoction in a big stainless steel bowl, and also when I try to mix the fruit, grains, nuts and yogurt in my cereal bowl, I think about what I’ve learned about mixing, some from Superior Steel, but even more from my Dad. Nice, small, even chops, a little at a time, and before you know it, I have a well distributed mixture.

Does anybody know where I can find a small hoe and a sturdy wheelbarrow that will fit on a kitchen countertop?

Closing quote

As a reward for your patient reading, here’s a nice quote from E.B. White (Charlotte’s Web), who said: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

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