[AT] Noise Concerns

[Indiana Robinson]

I spent a zillion hours running tractors from the time I was 8 or 9 (early
1950's). Some of the time mufflers were optional. Some of the loudest stuff
was the hammer mill, corn sheller and the hay chopper. The old John Deere
45 combine cab got pretty loud when running corn.
Even with all of that I blame most of my hearing loss and the accompanying
24-7 herd of crickets on several years of running machinery in a local
factory. That department was machine made plastic bags from tiny zipper
bags on up. Most of the machinery used numerous pneumatic cylinders along
side of several electric motors. That was about 1962. In those days
anything that didn't spill large amounts of blood or leave chunks of flesh
on the floor was considered a safe operation... Those air cylinders made a
loud report, often  as loud as a gunshot when the valves kicked on them and
while mufflers were in existence for them I never saw one in use. There
were maybe a couple of hundred air cylinders in that one room about the
size of a large school gym. Some of them were only a little bigger than a
small flashlight and ran up to a 5" bore and a 24" stroke.
When the horn blew for a shift change, break or lunch the level of silence
for the next 5 to 10 minutes was staggering... Hearing protection... What
hearing protection...
I'm not using  much hearing protection now but then I have not been
stirring up very much noise for some time now.  :-)
I am planning on running my sawmill this summer and I will definitely be
wearing hearing protection for that. It can be a bit of a screamer.

I am still doing better but we had a bit of an upset this week, Diana fell
and broke her arm Wednesday afternoon... I was not aware of how much the
handling of such things has changed. They stabilized it in a splint that is
a first cousin of a cast and have it in an adjustable sling. They want to
get the swelling out of it before they work on it. She goes to the
specialist Tuesday and the ER Dr. indicated that surgery was very likely.
Not a real good week...


-- 

Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com