I started the week loading up in a big service van, tall enough to stand up in. We pulled a trailer of aluminum piping in 40 MM and 25 MM sizes. At 20 feet long, the pipes hung off the end of the trailer about five feet with a red flag attached to the back. It was seven-thirty and we were pulling out of the shop heading an hour west to the Oregon Coast. Newport. We stopped off for gas on the way, and got there a bit early. We waited for our second van to show up. We called back to the office to figure out when the customer was supposed to arrive - moments later he showed up and we did a walk around of what we were going to do.
A few hours later, as my arms are aching as I'm tightening up a bolt above my head that's affixing a hanger that will allow us to put a strut that will hold the pipe up I'm looking out the windows of the shop that are 20 feet in the air and see a plane flying so close I feel like I could touch it. We're right by the airport so all the planes landing go right where I can see them. I can't take a picture, though, since it takes both hands to hold the hanger and the impact wrench. As I tighten the hanger down it slides off the I-Beam. I try again and no dice - it's just not hanging on. There's a bit of slope on the beam so when the impact wrench tightens down it slides off.
It's not the first, and won't be our last little issue we have to work through. We had a few different types of hangers in the trucks so we grabbed a few others and back up the lift I went to try them out. One of them worked much better - it had teeth on it so it dug into the metal before it could slip and I could really tighten it down. This was how things went. We couldn't use just use a single 90º turns on to go from the wall to the roof since the roof was angled. I had to use two 90ºs to get the angle I needed on one side and then used three 45º turns to get to the wall pipe on the other end since there was also a jog over instead of directly down.
Everything for the install was not simple. We had to sit off the wall on the north wall to not have to bend around the support beams on that side. The angles were tough, and the compressor we were connecting to was elevated instead of on the ground. All the shops we install pipe in are different. They have different needs, different priorities, different everything.
A thing that some people told me when they heard I was following my dad to do industrial air compressors was that AI was going to replace that work - robots would replace the mechanics who worked on the machines. Having spent all of three days doing the work and over a decade in the tech industry, the last two years being in the AI space, I can say there's no way that a robot could figure out how to grind down down brackets to make them fit around a double-wide beam, drill through to make a strut affix to a hanger on its side instead of back, delicately slide the spring clamps in, holding them just so in a way that you can attach a second strut to it, then reach up to put it on a beam after navigating the sissor lift to just the right spot? ...the only thing that it might be able to do is move the sissor life but I think we're decades if not more from having robots be able to do any of that work in a cost-effective manner...
There were dozens of times we had to pivot, change our plans, make custom tools and parts to make everything work together, and this was just a "simple" piping job. Plus, even though we were in a city center we were in an un-finished warehouse which meant no network connectivity either WiFi or cell service since the metal of the buidling made our phones useless beyond being cameras. The AI powered robots would have to have all their workloads running locally. I know things are moving fast but not that fast...
This new career shift is going to be an exciting view into a world I only previously looked at from afar.