San Francisco Public Works’ Post

Transcript

It's cool working on all these different places. I've always said we worked at City Hall and the engineer let me climb all the way to the top. And I think that's something that not a lot of people get to do. So I was really juiced about that, took some beautiful pictures, showed my wife. And then when we work at the airport, I mean, just walking on the tarmac, driving on the tarmac with these big huge planes next to me. I mean, little things like that I think are cool because not the average person gets to do all that stuff. And I think that's pretty awesome. Hi, my name is Jose Rodriguez. I work for Public Works in the glass shop, and I've been here for about 3 years and everything's going pretty good. But the glass shot, we pretty much service buildings owned by San Francisco Park and Rec, fire stations, police stations in San Francisco International Airport, and we take care of the mirrors. Anytime anybody breaks a piece of glass by accident or you know, we live in San Francisco, so there's a lot of graffiti and a lot of vandalism. So we'll go out, we'll measure the piece we need if we have it in stock. We'll go back to the shop, cut it and replace it. The piece for the public safety building I believe was hit and there was a crack in it and it's just visually an eyesore. It's fire rated, so it needed to be replaced. The piece was really, really heavy. It was on tight narrow spot. So we used a machine to pick it up and to actually set it just because it, it weighed, like I said, 900 lbs. And with our shop being so small and four of us, we needed extra help use. The machine was great. You know, Mike handled it, controlled it really well and we were able to get the piece out and the new piece. Again and everything worked out. In the shop moments where we cut our our glass, it's where we fabricate everything. It's where we get our tools or whatever material we need for the job together before we load up our trucks. We keep glass on hand. We have everything we need to service the majority of the work that we do. We use fire when we cut laminated glass. So laminated glass is something you would find in your car windshield where it can crack, but it won't necessarily come apart. It's kind of glued together with a piece of plastic. What we do when we heat it, we're melting the plastic so it separates a lot easier than it would not using fire. Today we're replacing ADA closers. For instance, most of the doors that close by themselves have what they call a closer. As a closer gets old, it starts to get slower, doesn't work as good. And the problem that they're having here at the main library is the doors are needed a lot more pressure than they should to open and close the door. So by putting in a new ADA closer, it's a lot easier to close and open the door. There's four people in the glass shop now. I think who you work with is really important and you know, just everybody so nice and it's really cool. We have a really good. Camaraderie between the four of us makes the day go by.