I feel like I’m looking in the mirror! That describes my life to a T. Luckily this year is already looking like it will be my best and I paid off all of my debt last year…so fingers crossed no famine next winter.
What do you do if you don’t mind me asking
I’m a commercial carpenter.
I’ve been building bridges the last few years and things are popping up here.
Right on, that’s good to hear. My old man used to build bridges for the railroad in BC.
Funny story, he used to sell hash in Ontario way back when and got busted one time. Goes to court with a cigarette pack size block of hash in his shirt pocket and the judge gives him 2 options: go to jail or they’ll buy him a bus ticket to BC and he not come back. Needless to say he took the trip lol
That’s a reasonable option.
B.C. is beautiful, I’ve been through there a few times.
I bet he worked some remote areas.
They’ve been talking about connecting our little railroad in Alaska to the Canadian railroad in Whitehorse.
We’ve got a bunch of mining that Canadian companies own and they drive it to Whitehorse.
It really is. I’ve seen most of it but I haven’t made my way up past Meziadin Juntion yet. I’d like to get up to the Yukon and Alaska sometime. Been the Hieder but it doesn’t really feel like I made it to Alaska.
Yeah I wish he had pictures from those times. Would have been cool to see. Heard lots of stories though.
Ahh OK that makes sense. Not nearly as economical as moving by rail.
I spent half a year in Ketchikan and I thought I was going to grow gills it was so wet.
Hahah yes I feel you there! I’ve been on Haida Gwaii a few times and it was wet more than it wasn’t. Kitimat, where I’m from, is similar. Not on open ocean but it’s a valley on the channel and the weather just sits there for months sometimes. Beautiful and miserable.
What is it you do?
I was thinking fisheries, but possibly mining?
So I went the other route, I went into metal fabrication. I figured I can always weld it back together if I f up, unlike wood. I started at 16 in an industrial fab shop. When they tan out of work I packed up to Vancouver and eventually found a shop and worked my way up to foreman. Then it went under due to the manager so I moved to Alberta and worked the drilling rigs for another 10 years. When that started to slow down I took a step back and said to myself: steel fab + rigging = boilermaker. I had no clue what a boilermaker was at that time. This will be my 3rd year in supervision.
There isn’t much of a fisheries industry in kitimat, it’s more river guides and ocean charters. I think Prince Rupert is more fisheries based.
Cool, I’ve worked a few jobs with boilermakers on them.
I have a good buddy that does steel fab his whole life.
Life and work have been real hard on him.
It’s been alot of fun. Been a part of some pretty cool projects and met alot of great people.
I can say when I was fabricating I wasn’t taking care of my health as I should have. Smoking under my welding shield, never wearing a respirator, always blowing black out of my nose.
And I see alot of self destruction in these trades where you’re away from home for extended periods of time and making good coin. I know quite a few guys that have hit rock bottom or are real close to it. It’s unfortunate.
Alcohol and hard drugs up here, mostly alcohol with tradesmen.
Alaska has a drinking problem.
I’ve definitely inhaled my fair share of silica.
Yeah its the same here. There’s one guy, he’s was THE guy for pulling bundles. Was a superintendent on huge projects. But he partied like a Rockstar. He was on my crew the other year as my bundle puller. Once my scope was done he didn’t show up for 3 days. He just had his lower leg amputated last week. His watering hole was raffling off a basket of booze as a fundraiser for him.
Hey, yes that looks like a classic example. I wished all ‘runts’ finished up like that lol !
Plenty of the C4DD are big yielders though and would do well for commercial too.
Fem C4DD sounds like a good plan i would like to do that someday.
The plan with the Contra D is to do a big selection and try to eliminate the streaky genes by just keeping the ‘big’ plants- which should be easy enough because they seem to have segregated pretty well. I grew 4 Contra girls a couple years ago as a test grow, got 2 big and 2 ‘little’ phenos. I still have both the big ones because they are such amazing plants. SImilar terps to the chem but the pine is amplified. Very moreish.
cheers for the feedback and ideas.
VG
Right on, I’ll be keeping watch! I want to pick up a bunch of your other lines this year, too many of them sound amazing lol. Schmavis sent me some Bluedigiberry f3s x godbud that I need to pop too.
wow had lots to catch up on in this thread.
Awesome grow all around. Some interesting strains too. Everyone I know that has grown VG’s C4DD line has been impressed. @VerdantGreen puts out solid work for sure.
The last few hours of discussion here talking about bridge building and steel fab and haida gwaii … born and raised in BC (fraser valley).
Haida Gwaii is one of my favorite places. It is just magical in it’s own way. I have fished the ocean there for halibut and salmon. Almost took a guiding job with one of the big outfits but decided to run my own charters for a few years in Nootka Sound. I have camped in the bush line of the north beach a few times for 2 week trips hunting deer in Novemberr and beach combing for scallops after the storms. If I was single and had the money to buy a home there… it’s one place I could see myself settling down.
In the 90’s I worked 2 jobs to support myself and pay my child support payments. Assistant kitchen manager and 2nd cook at swiss chalet and began my apprenticeship in steel fab. Quit the kitchen 2 years into the apprenticeship and in the year I finished my steel fab ticket I enrolled in structural engineering and worked the night shift and school during the day… just as I was finishing the last term of the engineering courses in 97 , that is when I had my life altering workplace accident. My entire time in steel fab and engineering was for bridge and structural spans like suspended gas pipeline crossings. It was on one of these jobsites that my accident happened. I love steel fab though… I miss that work big time.
sorry for my ramble… seems some of us have more in common than ganja 
You are more than welcome sharing your stories here! I know I’m not the only one who enjoys them.
The last time I was on Haida Gwaii I camped at misty meadows…it deserved the name lol. I think I’ve been there 3 times, the first two times I drank from a natural spring that’s along one of the roads. Legend has it if you drink that water you will come back. The 3rd trip I didn’t drink the water and I’ve yet to be back.
I used to have a bunch of agates that I collected. And remember hiking tow hill and getting soaked from the blowhole at the rocks. It reminds me of the beaches around tofino, just walking and walking finding cool treasures.
Got a tour of the long house where they were carving a cedar canoe and going into the details of their totem poles. It was alot of fun.
That was when they were still using the Queen of the North ferry…the one that sunk a few years back. I recall how rough those water could get, I think I was told it’s because it’s quite shallow, something like 50’ I believe. Been up in the wheelhouse a few times and I was surprised at how many fishing bouys they had to navigate around.
I feel you, steel fab is something that’s a part of me. Although the last shop I worked in really killed the enjoyment I had for welding. After that I said I wouldn’t do it for work anymore, just for my own artistic endeavors. I really enjoy the custom iron side of things. I made a pot rack after hours, beat all the edges in like it was hand forged, welded in carriage bolt heads to look like rivots. Arnold Schwarzeneggers stunt double bought it for $500 for his house he had just built up around Squamish.
We did a bunch of work for Henriquez as well at his house. He built a lighthouse pretty much. Inside ended up being walls of books and a ladder that would roll 360°.
We also did alot of work for the Woodwards redevelopment project, including taking down the W sign.
Oh one last one. This was my largest project with that shop. I have no pictures from fabbing as I was putting in 18hr days running the shop and working on the tools. I welded up the most critical connection joint, finished with a beautiful 4" wide cap. The welding inspector gave me shit for not being ticketed lol but it passed he said! Those are basically fake turnbuckles at the top. Everything about it was huge. And that style of bridge as you probably know is the most involved as far as the welding as their are no cross beams anywhere. Everything is right angles. It required the largest mobile crane in all.of the lower mainland to pick it up from our location and then install it. We had a very small window as they wanted to.open the street asap.
Do you mind my asking what your incident entailed?
cool stuff
my last fab job was about 9 years ago now(?)
a buddy hired me as lead hand and main fabricator for a job where we designed an industrial machine from the ground up. He gave me a large piece of cardboard with all these little sketches on it. I then translated that into a hand drawn 3D replica of what I thought he was after.
When we bid the job I was going up against companies with much deeper background but won it in the end. It’s hard to describe but was a machine , split into 3 , 8 foot long cabinets with conveyors inside and they were connected into a large U shape to form the entire machine. Everything was stainless steel and tig welded (not by me) and I designed and fabbed all the steelwork from start to finish. It was a bucket washer for United Flower Growers in burnaby bc. Was a big job… about 500 grand in the end for the company billing. I did all the design and fabrication with the help of the owner’s son who is a master Tig welder. My buddy who owned the company(retired now) and his other son did all the plumbing piping and steam fitting. Electrical was outsourced.
crappy pics but gives you an idea. They process and remove adhesive labels from 100’s of buckets a day. This machine revolutionized thier process and also decreased evironmental impact by reducing natural gas and water use by 24% and 30% respectively
my workplace accident accurred on a jobsite where I was at the forman shack overlooking some cut lists and inventorying material. There was a sloped steep bank leading up to a work pad where the lift trucks unloaded steel off the semi trailers. At the top of the slop was a chainlink fenced area for full bottles of oxygen, acetylene, C02/Argon ect.
Well a guy with very little lift truck experience and being new to the yard had a mishap that resulted in 2ft diameter pipes rolling off his forks and into that chained fenced area. That knocked some bottles off the pad and down the slope. I had ear protection on and didn’t see it coming but one of the bottles knocked me to the ground and onto a pile of loose 3inch pipe that was behind me. Nobody was there with me when it happened and I was trapped with this bottle on top of me, pinnng my pelvis to the left of my groin and fully depressing my chest. I had to get my elbows tight to my side and got barely enough lift to be able to breath. I tried yelling but no one was within ear shot or sight of me. The bottle was one of those big white near 2 ft around, 5 ft high with 4 regulator ports on top so weighed near 400 pounds. Tey have a 3/4inch thick railing around the top of them and it took everything I had to grasp that , kinda bear hug the bottle with my right leg , rocked side to side a couple times and on the 4rth or 5th try I managed to roll the bottle over my left leg and hip. I had broken ribs and lots of bruising and abrasionsions from accident. When I rolled the bottle I tore the muscles between my spine and right scapula, and I had what they call a spontaneous “sublaxation” of my left sacroilliac joint. Which means for an instant, my tailbone separated from my pelvis along the SI joint. Permanently damaging the ligaments that hold it from moving. Unfortunatley for me it was also discovered that I have a tailbone where the top segment did not fuse to the rest during fetal development and so I have 6 lumbar vertebrae instead of the normal 5. This genetic anomaly has made any fix impossible unless I want to be in a wheel chair with no use or feeling in my legs. Sucks to be me LOL but I get by… so many others have it worse than me when it comes to disabilities. But ya… that was the injury that put me out of the trade and the genetic anomaly in my spine/tailbone was WCB’s perfect out for having to pay me for life or retrain me for something else. They fought me to the bitter end and that is pretty much my story LOL
Nice! I’ve never been involved in anything automated like that. Very cool.
We did alot of stainless work for the bars and restaurants downtown van. There’s something about peeling back that plastic on fresh stainless sheet metal 🤌
That is so brutal. Now I totally understand the mobility and pain issues you’ve been speaking of. I feel for you, that would not be a fun experience at all.
Worst that’s happened to me was crushing my thumb and ripping out the nail and half inch of root. Doc said it probably wouldn’t grow back, but it did! Then a week later I smashed my other thumb with a hammer while levelling scaffold. So there I am, a pot smoker with two thumbs but no nails. Learned how to roll with just my fore and middle fingers haha. It’s surprising how much support your nails provide to your fingers and thumbs.
I’ve heard horror stories with wcb, much like insurance. Maybe you will win the lottery and can get some stem cell injections. Could make a whole holiday out of it in Panama!
