The cutting table:

Goto Jan 25th for the start of this story



Yesterday I wrote about the job at the rock table. It was not a hi-tech job like I have now, but one that require at the minimum that you could tell the difference between a rock and a sugar beet. The reason this was so important was that the next step was slicing and dicing of the beets.

The beets left this rock table and fell into a holding area where an elevator scooped them up and lifted them 3 stories. From there they fell into another staging-bin and gravity slowly pulled them into the cutting machines.

There were 2 o machines were the middle spun, like a food grader you have in your kitchen. The beets would feed into the top of the machine and the high speed/spinning knives would do their job slicing and dicing. This was the reason 4 people below were to remove the rocks. Once a rock entered into the machine, you would hear a bunch of clinking and the system had to be shut down, the knife drum removed, another one slid back in and the process started again. These drums were so big they used overhead pulleys on tracks to lift and move them.

Once removed the drum had to be tore down, the blades removed and sharpen. The guys who did the sharpening never seemed to be happy about their job for some reason. I never had to work up there except once so I never knew why they always seemed to be pissed off. 2 guys spent most of their time just taking out dull knives and replacing with sharp knives

Guess what: Remember my last blog, This is why we were requested to go onto the cutting floor and assist in the dismantling the cutters.

It seems that these gents who normal did this job knew the smell and refused to clean up the unit. As the whole plant process required that the cutters be running full-speed, we were requested to come up and do the switch under their supervision. In fact they had to stop unloading trcuks as there was nowhere to go with the beets. Everything was designed to run as one fluid system up to this point.

Being a rather newbie at the whole thing, we did as told. We had to pull the drum ,wash down the whole unit and reassemble the system. We did it, and trust me, the smell of all the cookers did not dampen the smell of that unit. I have no clue if they dumped any of the fresh beet cuttings that had moved on, but I am sure they did.

After inspection, the system was placed back online and we all were threaten that we would lose our jobs if it happened again. I learned a valuable lesson that day and that was “It is better to have a Skunk in hand then a skunk in the cutters.”

Tomorrow will be about the cookers.