detail from: KRK Art dizajn

CADILLAC PROJECT

Simo Jelača, Ph.D.

In 2001, we lived in Windsor. Maja got a job at Nortel, so she moved to Ottawa. She rented an apartment, together with her friend Sandra, who also already worked at Nortel. Bosa and I traveled to Ottawa to fix up their apartment while the two of them were working. Our first impression of Ottawa was very pleasant, we liked the city, neat, not too big, there are a lot of parks, it is safe, it looked pleasant to live in, and as a supplement the leaves on the trees were completely red at the time and looked almost unreal beautiful. During the short stay, the citizens also seemed peaceful to us, and the city is otherwise very international. A special look was given by the Parliament, erected on a hill above the Ottawa River, of the same name as a city, and the National Gallery, in the immediate vicinity, in a modern style and filled with paintings by world and Canadian contemporary masters of art.

Some time before that, I completed a course for starting my own business and registered my own company for designing industrial facilities. The first jobs I managed to get were the construction of protective fences around the robots that served the presses. I did those projects at New Hydra Wintech. I got the next project from Dainty Foods. In that company, I designed new packaging lines, and when I found out that the same company did not have a single copy of the existing equipment projects, which were done by American companies, I agreed with the director to make drawings of the entire factory and I installed them. computer program AutoCad 14, valid at the time.

At the same time, I worked on adaptation projects for the AMD Agri-Industries oil factory at the project office of Haddad Morgan and Associates Ltd. In that factory, a very successful project that I did was a station for washing wagons, in which edible oil was transported.

After successfully completing the previous few projects, I gained my own trust and embarked on a very bold venture. Namely, I was offered a project for cooling castings in the Cadillac foundry, in the company Hayes Lemmerz, in Michigan. I accepted the same and worked on it in cooperation with the company New Hydra Wintech, that company produced what I designed. The cooling line of the castings consisted of swings that traveled like a cable car, on which cast red-hot car parts were placed, and while the swings traveled in a circle, for three hours, they were cooled enough and removed from the swings, and then on they were loaded with new castings. And so those swings go in circles, non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The foundry works non-stop. The cable car supports on which the swings hung were designed by experts from the Haddad and Morgan bureau. A total of 180 swings were placed on the cable car line, and until everything passed in a full circle, the transport time lasted three hours. When the installation of the casting cooling system in the Cadillac foundry was agreed, I accepted the supervision and it was agreed exactly one month, and we performed all the work in 28 days, without any mistakes, and put the system into operation two days before the deadline. For the award, the director of the company Hayes Lemmerz, Mr. Tom Wupper, took me and Mile Marić, the owner of the company New Hydra Wintech, to dinner, where we were treated to lobsters, and Mr. Marić gave me 100 US dollars for a job well done.

When I was leaving Windsor for the Cadillac, while we were filming the terrain for setting up the cooling system, at the New Hydra Wintech company, they gave me their pickup car with instructions to drive the already made parts. And it happened that they did not state the number of the contract in my documents, so when I was at the customs counter, the clerk asked me about the number of the contract, and I didn't know it, and she brought me back from the border. At the same time, she didn't tell me anything, she just didn't allow me to import goods to America. I return to the company New Hydra Wintech, get the contract number and go to the same border crossing again. When there was another officer at the same counter and he asked me: - Why are you forbidden to enter America? I, astonished, not knowing what was going on, said to him: - I was here an hour ago, and I pointed to the clerk who wrote it for me, and she was just having breakfast in her cubicle, and that clerk then let me in America. I had a hard time accepting that for such a thing, a contract number, they can write you a ban, and if by chance you don't know about it, and you show up at the border after a year, they may not allow you entry forever.

At the same company, Hayes Lemmerz, while we were installing the supporting pillars for the swing system, I put my business card in the concrete, which we had just poured into the foundations, and the technical director of the factory, Mr. Tom Wupper, observed what I was doing and approached me, asking: - May I know what you did? I answered him: - I put my business card in the concrete, so when after a hundred years someone demolishes all this, maybe they will find out who built this. Tom liked it, so he asked me to insert his ticket, which I did with pleasure. We both took it as a joke.

All the time I was doing that Cadillac project, I lived for a month at the Hampton Inn Hotel, Cadillac, ate at restaurants, and in my spare time walked the streets of this small, pleasant town, also called Cadillac. Even the lake in the city itself is named Cadillac. Everything here is Cadillac, and people feel like Cadillac residents, most of them drive Cadillac cars, so I almost didn't accept that I myself became a Cadillac person too.

One of older Cadillac models

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