Tiny's Workshop

A housekeeping note. Yesterday was the second Saturday, and today the ship has finally agreed it is Sunday. For the purposes of this log I am writing about the second Saturday under today's date, because otherwise the archive gets confused, and because I suspect the archive and I are equally tired of the date line.

Down below

Tiny collected me after breakfast. The bosun runs the deck, not the engine room, but he has spent so many years on this class of ship that the engineers regard him as an honorary member of their department, and he regards the workshop as a second living room. Big Kev has given him what Tiny calls "a key and a look". The key opens the workshop. The look means he is responsible for anything I do in it.

The engineering workshop is not what I expected. I expected chaos. What I got was the cleanest, most organised room I have seen since the laundry, with every tool on a pegboard behind a painted outline of itself, so you can see at a glance what is missing. A drill press. A welding bay behind a screen. Racks of steel bar and brass rod. And in the middle, bolted to the deck, a lathe that looked about fifty years old and was, Tiny said, about fifty years old.

"Older than Marco," he said. "More reliable."

Learning to turn

I have used a lathe before, twice, at evening classes, many years ago, in a room that did not move. I explained this to Tiny. He nodded and said, "So you have not used a lathe," and handed me safety glasses.

The first hour was spent not turning anything. He showed me how to set the tool height, how to centre the work, how to stand so that if something went wrong the something would go somewhere other than me. He showed me the emergency stop and then made me show it back to him three times. He told me that on a ship you always keep one hand for yourself, and that in a workshop you keep both hands for yourself, and you lend them to the machine only when you have to.

Then he put a short length of brass rod in the chuck and said, "Make it round."

"It is round."

"Make it rounder."

So I did. Or I tried. The first cut was timid and achieved almost nothing. The second was too greedy and the tool chattered and I stopped the machine in a panic. Tiny did not say anything. He simply reached over, adjusted the feed by a tiny amount, and pointed. The third cut sang. A ribbon of brass came off the tool in a perfect gold spiral and curled across the bed, and I felt, I am not ashamed to say, the same feeling I had the first time the Miata started after the turbo went on.

Fathers and Peugeots

You talk, at a lathe. Not much, and not while cutting, but in between, while measuring, while the swarf is being cleared.

Tiny's father had a Peugeot 504 in Lagos. White, he said, although by the end it was more of an opinion than a colour. His father kept it running for twenty six years with a toolbox, a radio, and a vocabulary Tiny is not prepared to repeat. Tiny learned to hold a spanner in the footwell of that car, being passed things and asked to hold a torch steady, which he says is the hardest job in engineering and the one nobody thanks you for.

I told him about my own early cars, and about the Miata, and about the evening I spent with a borrowed engine crane in a friend's garage and the noise my back made at the end of it. He told me about the time the 504's gearbox was rebuilt on a kitchen table. We agreed that every proper mechanic has rebuilt something on a kitchen table at least once, and that every kitchen table has an opinion about it.

At some point Yuki came in to borrow a micrometer, heard the words "kitchen table", and left again without a word. I understand there will be a spreadsheet about this.

The project

By lunch I had a piece of brass about the size of a cotton reel, faced at both ends, with a shallow groove turned around its middle that was very nearly even.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Not finished," said Tiny, and took it out of the chuck, wrapped it in a rag, and put it in his overall pocket.

I asked again. He said it was for me, and that I would get it when it was done, and that it would be done when it was done. Then he made me sweep the shavings, wipe down the bed, oil the ways, and put every single tool back inside its painted outline, and only then did he let me leave.

Big Kev passed us on the way up. He looked at my hands, which were grey to the wrist, and at my face, which I imagine was pleased with itself.

"He let you near the lathe," Kev said.

"He did."

"Hm," said Kev. Then, after a pause, "Next time, mind the tailstock," which I am told is a compliment.

Evening

Elena made adobo for dinner, which I ate with the specific hunger of a man who has done physical work for the first time in months. Priya sat opposite and noticed the brass under my fingernails.

"You have been down in the workshop with Tiny."

"I have."

"You look like you have been given a puppy."

I did not deny it. She smiled into her rice and asked what we had made. I told her it was a secret. She said she did not like secrets she was not part of, and that she would find out by Wednesday. I believe her.

Container was waiting on my pillow. She sniffed my hands, sneezed, and moved six inches down the bed, which is the furthest she has voluntarily been from my face in a fortnight. Apparently brass and cutting oil are where she draws the line.