Manufacturing Mayhem

        I dreamed that I was visiting some sort of steel fabrication plant. The machines were all powered from a central pair of drive shafts that ran the length of the building. There was a huge spinning power coupling along a large catwalk.

        The coupling was a pair of worm gears that were so hot they were glowing orange. The sprockets that engaged them drove some belts and such far below. Large bricks of steel about 800 pounds each were bouncing along a powered conveyor belt. The worm gears were so hot that parts of them slumped and the belts began to buck and shimmy.

        I grabbed a sledge and climbed up to the power transfer station. While I was climbing, two of the steel bricks flew off the belt and smashed into the concrete in front of the foreman’s office, leaving eight to ten inch craters in the floor. The concrete looked like a large spider web for several feet around.

        I reached the platform and used the sledge to smack the set pins out, and then to punch the transfer sprocket away from the drive shaft. Before I could finish three or four more steel bricks jumped off the conveyor, smashing into equipment below them.

Ad astra per technica,
FF