Bailey, Edward

              EDWARD BAILEY



HOW I CAME TO Y-12
	

I got sent from the US infantry to Oak Ridge Tennessee and got here on Valentine’s Day 1945.
I was assigned out at K25 where I worked in the counting laboratory, and I was over there for three years and got introduced to statistical quality control over there. On March 1, 1948 was my first time in Y-12 and they brought me over here to use statistical quality control on uranium accountability. I was actually a department in the uranium accounting department under Fred Huffman.


THE DEVELOPMENT DIVISION


I guess I must have been in the inspection department, I would say probably, six or seven years, and I transferred down to the development division and was put in charge of mechanical development and we had a new building built and when I moved into it, it was completely empty, and we concentrated on supporting the mechanical operation division. The things; we concentrated on super accuracy. We worked on, well, we got the first laser interferometers into the Y-12 plant. We developed air bearing spindles, we learned from the DuPont people over in Wilmington that they had done some real super precision work using diamond knives, something to get super accurate on making the holes in movie film. Apparently there’s so many holes in movie film, and they’ve got to be spaced just right. Well, we took some of their technology over here, and we had them develop a machine for us that was working in the millionths of an inch. We gave them several tasks. One of them was to make a four inch diameter ball, aluminum ball, four inch diameter that was in about five millionths of exactly four inches, and they did it. And then we had them make some hollow hemispheres, and there was a guy over there named Tommy Lewis. He never went to college, a wonderful guy. He knew how to make these air bearings, and we hired him to make the first one and then our guys in development decided, well they made one, we’ll make six. We’ve got to be able to make enough of them to get into production so that all of our Y-12 turning machines could have air bearing spindles. Beautiful thing about the air bearing was no heat. It was a shame when you had these super accurate machine tools that you want to make something exactly the right size and the machinist has to pull out a micrometer to do that when the machine is capable of working in millionths of an inch. And so the conventional bearings, the guy would start machining, and the heat from the bearings would move the part while he was trying to machine on it. With an air bearing that problem went away, and we developed automatic tool setting so that man doesn’t have to use the micrometer anymore. The machine itself goes and finds out where it is and where the part is and cuts the part plus or minus a thousandth of an inch in a free formed shape, just really fantastic thing. Thousandth of an inch, a sheet of paper is three thousandths of an inch thick. Our tolerances were a thousand of an inch, imagine that. 


DUPONT & THE AIR BEARING SPINDLE


	The big problem, when you’re doing these super accurate machines with plus or minus a thousandth inch on tolerances everything has got to be controlled, the heat in the machines, the coolant temperatures, and being able to make these super accurate measurements. Well, we’d heard about this stuff at DuPont. So we went over there and started talking with these guys and they never had any reason to think about making a big machine tool spindle. A great big thing, going to hold these big parts, turn them accurate, and be able to stand there with a machine tool forces cutting on the part. But this guy over there, Tommy Lewis, thought he knew how to do it, and so we came up with a big contract, all classified of course. All the classifications guys go as crazy on what we could do and what we could tell him. But anyhow, this guy came up with a wonderful design and great big spindle. We brought her down. They made it. The people in Wilmington made the spindle. So we brought it down to 9202 in the mechanical development department and started putting it through its paces, and I remember how proud we were of that thing. Roger Hibbs comes by with visitors from outside the plant showing off this spindle and bragging about it. We knew we had to have more of them and no machine tool company was building them, Heald, EX-CELL-O, none of them. So we decided we were going to make six of them, and some of our development engineers kind of chocked on that because they wanted to build one and find out what’s wrong with it and build another other and find out what’s wrong. We didn’t have time for that. So we said we’re going to do six of them, and it’s going to cost enough that you’re going to do it right. You’re not going to tweak this thing, you’re going to do it right. So we built the six of them. Rocky Flats machining, they were out there machining plutonium, and they had the same kind of heat accuracy problem, and I remember a guy from Rocky Flats wanted to buy one of them. And son of a gun, we sold him one, put it out there in the plutonium plant, of course that’s the last you ever heard of that because it all got contaminated. But anyway, we got these six spindles built and put them on machines in Y-12, and then we went to the machine tool builders and said we need you to make these for us on our machines we’re buying from you. So the only way they’d agreed to do it was as a best effort. So we gave them the drawings and said you build it according to these drawings, we’ll buy them, and it worked out well. It got them in the business of being able to do that job in the quantities we could use. And so of course they’re all through our plant, at least they were when I was here 20 years ago. I don’t know what’s out there now. It really, really worked out. Phil Steger was the guy we assigned to head that project. I ran into him this morning. As I was coming out of the mall, Phil was coming in.
Son of a gun. That was the good old days.


EXPLOSIVE FORMING


Well in the machining business what you’re trying to do is to make things of a certain shape.
You do it by cutting on them with machine tools and lathes and drilling holes and all that sort of thing.
Well, another way of changing the shape of something is to put some explosive on one side of it and put the metal where you want it and have a mandrel back there and you set off the charge and bang! You’re supposed to shape that metal around that mandrel, and we hadn’t done anything like that in Y-12, but we were in the development business and thought maybe something could be done with that. And so Vick Hogus got kind of excited about it and started dreaming up ways to do it. Of course, there were big safety problems with anything like that, setting off big explosives at the end of the plant, and we did some early work on some simple shapes with rather thin materials, but I really I never saw it, I never saw it do any real parts made that got shipped out of the plant. Now maybe it has since then because this was the really early stages of it.


TENTHS


When I came here Y-12 had just begun taking over machining jobs which had all been done at Los Alamos before and Jack Case and I guess Bill Strohecker went out to Los Alamos together to find out how things were doing, came back here and got things going, got new machine tools in and training people.
Of course it was all highly classified. One real interesting thing, these designed agencies like Los Alamos or Livermore had project engineers who were really, most of them were mechanical engineering backgrounds and they would come in here and approve everything we did and say yes and no, was this good enough, was that not. I remember one thing that really gave those guys trouble. We were doing very accurate machining work and plus or minus a thousandth of an inch you know was a very tight tolerance. A thousandth of an inch is about a third of a thickness of a sheet of paper, and they start talking to guys and they’d hear us Y-12 guys talking in tenths and that really shook them up. Tenths, you’re talking about a thousandth and now you’re talking about a tenth? And of course we were talking about a tenth of a thousandth, we just weren’t using the extra words to spell it out every time. But some of those guys had so much trouble with the concept that they wanted us to change the way we were talking. Can you imagine going out in the machine shop, and guys don’t talk tenths no more. Always say tenth of a thousand.
Anyhow, that was just fun, little interesting anecdote that went along.


BEST THEY COULD DO


We had good relations with most of those project engineers, but the big challenge was ramping up to meet new reduction schedules on new weapons, and we would go out and place orders with machine tool builders like American up in Cincinnati. We’d order 100 lathes at a time of the most accurate lathes they’d ever built. Duplicating lathes with being able to make freeform shapes and a lot of the machines would come back and we’d inspect them and we had to rebuild them, and the mechanical operations group had guys that worked full time scraping lathes and rebuilding machines to meet our tolerances. The machine tool builders were doing the best they could, but they just weren’t quite good enough and so we’d bring them back and do things to them, add air bearing spindles, whatever. 


PRESSURE BOTTLES


One of the new technologies that came about had to do with pressure bottles. They needed bottles that would hold tritium gas and under high pressure, real high pressure, and so we had a fella in our mechanical development group, remember Fred Jones, got all excited about filament winding. He was a mechanical engineer, master’s degree from UT, and he got going; you’d make a thin metal bottle with a little hole in it and then you would wind it with fiberglass and epoxy and you’d wind and wind and all different shapes and make a big ball and those things would stand fantastic pressures. Fred had some big ideas about some of these conical and shapes like you would have a nose cone on a missile, and he went out and bought the weirdest, wildest, machine you had ever saw that would wind big nose cone shapes.
Round and round it would go and layer after layer, and that turned out to be a pretty good deal, pretty good job. Fred was the big leader in getting that job done. Fred’s dead now you know he died about a couple months ago. He and Harold Fell, Vic Hogus, Kao Pierson, those guys are all dead now. They were in my mechanical development department.


JOHN GORDON


John was the guy, he took all the doors off the restroom in the commodes and you know you sit on the stool you got no door there. John wanted to be able to in the rest room and see who was who so he took all the doors out of the restroom. John Gordon had an office up in 9212 in the main machine shop, and I remember he lost his eyesight and had to leave. I had that one funny memory of John having to do with the men’s room, left all the doors off the toilets so that he could see who was who. He didn’t want guys going in there and sitting the whole darn shift.


GORDON FEE’S GOPHER


	I’d been with the DOE about then year, and I started thinking about retirement. And it looked to me like if I could get back to work with the contractor I could make a big increase in my pension. Joe LaGowen understood that and agreed that I could come back and Hopkins made it happen, and Clyde Hopkins made it happen. And I asked Clyde what do you want me to do, and I said, “Well, I want you to go into Gordon Fees office every morning and say, ‘here Gordon. Let me do that’.” And so I went into the Y-12 plant. Had a nice office up in the ad building, and I was essentially Gordon’s Gopher. I’d go for this or go for that, whatever, and I worked hard and long hours and wrote a lot of reports. Finally I decided, well, it’s about time for me to retire. So Gordon arranged for a nice retirement for me up at Stinerbell up there. They were having a meeting, and my wife and I went up there and some guys said some awful nice things while I was there. When I got my time to stand up an talk I said, “Well, when I came back to Y-12 I’d intended to stay five years, but Gordon showed me how to get five years done in three. So I’m out of here.” 


MORE STATISTICAL QUALITY CONTROL


	Well, Jeff Herdin wanted me to come over and do statistical quality control in the uranium accounting department. I had been doing; I learned something about statistics while I was doing the same thing in the laboratory at K-25. So I came over here, and they set me down in building, I forget the number, anyhow I walked into this building and here was a little office with two desks, and he said, “Here. This is your office.” And Red Reese was sitting right over there next door. Yeah, I sat in there with Red for quite a while. The IMB machines where right next door, and I did a lot of work with the IBM machines, punch cards, keeping track of U2-35


MY CAREER HERE AT Y-12


	Oh, it was an exciting time. Back in the war years, I came here in ’48, the war was over but uranium 2-35 was very important. You had to keep track of it. You didn’t want anybody stealing it. Exciting time. Working at state of the art in measurements, and then in the inspection business things had never been done before. Inspection machines had never been built before, a really exciting time and then getting into development. Man, you loved to come to work, and it was really great. I’m very, very fortunate to have been here during those days. 


VERY LUCKY


	I’m just very, very lucky to have been here when I was, a great place to go to work. If I ever regret it’s that I came out to Y-12 on a Sunday afternoon in the summer time with the sun shinning, hunting around for the light switches to turn on the building so I could do some work. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have been back home. That’s what I should have been doing. It was a great place to work and great people and had a great time. I’m just so happy it all happened the way it did. 


THE BEST EQUIPMENT


	After about three years we were making bomb parts, and I was put in charge of the dimensional inspection department at Y-12 and ran that for a number of years and bought a lot of new equipment that was making dimensional measurements that are far greater accuracy than had been done. We bought a lot of big new machines in there. And it was pretty clear that Jack Case had the attitude that you had to have all the equipment that you needed, and you went out and bought the best there was. It seemed he had a philosophy that you could always get the people to run the equipment, but if you didn’t have the equipment you were stuck, and so we brought in a lot of big inspection equipment—Jig bores and Sheffield made rotary contour gages, and it was a very exciting time. 	Jack was a big supporter of going out and getting these big machines because he knew you had to have them. Some of the other people in the plant got kind of upset at the excess cost. They considered excess cost, but we really felt free to get the job done. We had some real exotic shapes on some of these bomb parts. I remember the thorium part that led to getting the big—jig bore, shipped all the way over here from Switzerland just to do that job. We used a big machine, a big jib bore as an inspection machine. 


WHEN I FIRST WORKED WITH JACK CASE


	I was coming into the plant through the north portal and Jack was driving in, and he gave me a ride. That was really the first time I ever knew him. I got to know him real well when I got put in charge of inspection. When I was in the uranium accounting department, my main job was determining the accuracy of all the measurements, making our material balances come out close to zero as we could. I didn’t have too much to do with him then. It was when I got into the inspection department. I remember the machine shop guys. They were always complaining that we inspectors were trying to screw up all they were doing, and we had a lot of discussions about what’s the right philosophy for an inspection department. Naturally, all of the machine shop guys wanted us to always have that attitude, we’re going to try to accept this if we possible can, and of course they’d do things to the parts and tap on holes that weren’t quite right. So they wouldn’t take the no go gage and stuff like that. 


JACK CASE: OUTSIDE THE PLANT

	
	I remember working with Jack Case. We had some good times outside the plant. We used to go hunting. One time Jack and my son and Nute Hamby and Jim Patterson went up in Morgan county out there grouse hunting and just had a great time. He loved to hunt. Jack loved to shoot shotguns. We belonged to the Oak Ridge sportsman association. Every weekend Jack would be out there shooting skeet, and Ken Bailer. Ken Bailer. My son was about sixteen years old, and I took him out there one weekend, and Ken Bailer showed him how to shoot skeet. Went all around the different post. Jack was shooting on that very same round that my son was shooting. He loved to hunt, and I enjoyed guns all my life. I was captain of Tennessee State Rifle Team up the national matches up in Camp Perry. When my son was 16 years he went along as a junior shooter. I remember one rainy day. I was driving, and Jack and Nute Hamby and Jim Patterson and my son was along, and we got up around Wartburg and tramp through the fields grouse hunting. We never got anything. We sure did love walking those fields though. I remember one time we got back in the car and my son ate a whole entire loaf of bread. It was ravenous, all worn out from going those fields, but we were wet and tired. I remember we drove up Glenn Rock Mountain on time, me driving. We were going up there. Someone had heard a good place to hung grouse up there. Coming back down my car hit a rock and broke the break line. Oh, we had some exiting times. I remember Hazel, Jacks wife. I remember when I left to go to Kokomo a guy up in—had given me a fancy bottle of wine while I was up there. We were up there talking about super accurate turning machines, and when I went to Kokomo I took that bottle of wine over to Jacks house and knew he’d love it. 


JACK CASE: WHEN WE’D GET IN TROUBE


	I was so impressed with Jack when we’d get in trouble. The plant would be trying to do some real difficult job and get new machines and try to make them work, and there was always things go wrong. And usually Jack would get a group of us into his office, and we’d sit around talking, and everybody would be trying to come up with their part of the problem. I was always representing the inspection department. We’d all figure out what we needed to do. And Jack would let us all talk, and then when we’re just about done, one thing that always struck me, really struck, Jack would always say, “Okay, now what do you need from me?” And if you didn’t say anything you kind of had the monkey on your back, and you went out and made things work. 


REPORTING ON JACK CASE


	I went up to Kokomo Indiana for; I was up there almost three years. I was in charge of a chemical laboratory up there and then got up in the investments castings business. I remember Jack Case came up there and visited my house, brought several other guys with him, Dixie Walkern, Claude Hensley, and some other guys. They were coming up for John Murray’s retirement party, and after about three years I came back to Oak Ridge, worked with the Atomic Energy Commission. I was in charge of quality assurance at the Atomic Energy Commission. Later became Energy Research and Development Administration. Then the Department of Energy while I was up there, they asked me to come out to Y-12 and do a quality assurance survey, and I think the people in Albuquerque particularly were concerned about how we always met production schedules and why was that, and they sent me out there and I interviewed a lot of people, and wrote a rather detailed report, and some of those guys told me things they never should have, but I think that was because they knew I’d been at Y-12 all those years. Well, it came time to present my report, and we were up here in the conference room in the old ad building in the old vault, and we were sitting around the table. Hershel Hickman was the DOE guy in charge of the Y-12 plant, and I asked Hershel, I said, “Is it okay to give them my report?” He said, “Well, it’s your report. Go ahead and give it to them.” And Paul Vanstrom was sitting there, and Jack Case was sitting there, and I guess Paul was kind of like Jack’s boss at the time. Anyhow, I handed the report to Jack. It was very gratifying to see Jacks acceptance of my report, but once again we were kind of friends. I guess we present things in the most accurate light that we knew how to do it. 


TRIPS WITH JACK CASE


	All the machining going on at all the sites around the country had similar problems, and had similar problems with machine tool builders being able to get the equipment they needed. So the AEC set up in Inner Agency Mechanical Operations group, and they had different people concentrating on different things, procurement and super accurate machining and inspection and stuff like that. We would travel around the country having their meetings at different sites. Kansas City and Rocky Flats and Y-12 and Los Alamos. We’d have meeting oh maybe every few months and talk of our problems and what we’re doing, bring everybody up to speed, and I remember going to meetings with a group of us at a time and Jack would go along, and a lot of times Jack would like to have a good time, and we’d learn where the good places in town were out in Denver, the tropics, and some of those places. San Francisco was always a big hit when we went to Livermore. We’d have good fellowship on these meetings if you like. I remember one meeting in Las Vegas. It was a big meeting, a lot of people there, and Jack got some kind of bad news at that Las Vegas meeting because everybody was talking about the problems of temperatures on machine tools and what could you do to control the temperatures because metal shrinks, steel shrinks and expands, and unless you can hold the temperature really fixed it’s going to move while your trying to do this super accurate machining. Jack became a real supporter of efforts to control temperature. I guess the air bearing was one of the biggest. It was a problem with solved. It probably could be solved. All you had to do is want to do it. Money got spent and problem got solved. 


JACK CASE: BREAKING DOWN THE BARRIERS


	There was an International Machine Tool group and they would have meetings in Europe, and one year I got to go. I can’t remember the name. I think maybe some French name for the meetings. I don’t remember what it was, but there was a big machine tool show over in Belgium, and I got to go and came back with a lot of good ideas from the meeting. And so the next year I put on a big pitch that we ought to send Vick Hovas over there. Vick Hovas was building little machine tools around the plant, and trying to make machines that would do one specific job, but do it very, very cheaply and very, very fast. And so I talked up sending Vick, and Jack thought that would be a great idea, but let’s send Claude Hensley along with him. Claude was Jack’s main man in the machine shop. Jack used to say he was the best man on his feet than any guy in a machine shop he ever knew. Development always has a problem. These engineers want to do their thing, but the motivation for the development was to develop something that would help the plant. I used to tell my guys, “As soon as you know they’re not going to use it, quit working on it and go and work on something they will use.” Sending Vick and Claude over there together, boy that really broke down some barriers in the plant with those guys traveling all over Europe together going to these different companies. That was a great idea, great idea. Jack made it happen. 


JACK TREATED PEOPLE WELL


	Well, I’m sure Jack had people he didn’t like and respect, but I have trouble identifying any of them. He treated people well, and I never heard him holler. He had some guys that really gave him a lot of trouble, but then they got the job done, and he knew he needed them, and maybe they knew too which is why they gave him such a hard time. But he was just a great guy, great guy.