MANILA, Philippines—Froilan C. Roque works in a factory bursting with cash but still went out of his way to help save public funds.
For nearly 25 years now, this machinist has been reporting for work at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) security plant complex in Quezon City, and has seen up close how coins are minted and bank notes printed.
Truth is, he used to work at the bank’s vaults pouring molten gold into metal molds to produce gold bars.
And in recent years, he has been heading a crew that churns out those elaborate medals that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo awards every year to artists, exemplary public servants, dignitaries, sports heroes, among others.
At the bank, Roque, now 49, is one of the regular guys but is recognized by many as the creative employee who devised contraptions that made the process of refining gold and making medals at the BSP plant much easier.
One jig he devised came in handy when the President ordered medals for less than 200 dignitaries attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in Cebu in early 2007. It also saved the BSP some P756,000.
(A jig is a device that holds a piece of work, and guides the tools operating on it.)
For this, Roque was named one of this year’s Civil Service Commission (CSC) awardees for outstanding public service.
A recipient of the commission’s Pagasa Award, he was given a P50,000 cash prize and a medal, which he and his colleagues fashioned last year, from the President in awarding rites in Malacańang on Sept. 19.
Beyond call of duty
In its citation, the CSC said Roque “went beyond the call of duty” when he designed the “bar-folding jig” and the “big sunburst fixture” that improved the old technology of medal-making at the BSP plant.
“I’ve been asked before what motivated me to devise these, and my usual reply was: ‘Laziness,”’ he said, chuckling. “I invented them precisely because I wanted my work to become easier.”
Roque completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Education (Major in Machine Shop) at the Marikina Institute of Science and Technology in Marikina City, where he grew up and now lives with his wife and three children.
Machinists
After graduation in 1979, he worked as a machinist in three private companies, repairing and making machinery. In 1980, he applied for a job at the BSP office on East Avenue in Quezon City, and was hired three years later.
He started out as a technician making replacement parts for worn-out machines and dies (engraved devices used for stamping a design on coins or medals), and spent the next 17 years doing the same stuff. He eventually rose from the ranks to become supervisor at the die-making unit.
Gold from small-scale miners
In 2000, Roque was posted at the gold refining division, where he and others melted gold brought in by small-scale miners from the mountains, and turned them into gold bars inside the gold bullion vault.
It was here that he first won an “employee of the year” award in 2002 for devising a “weighing scale platform” that ensured that the gold bars have the same weight.
Three years later, in 2005, Roque was pulled out to work at the medal-working unit in the inner sanctum of the highly secured BSP complex.
Order of Sikatuna
Since the BSP was designated as a maker of presidential medals and decorations in 2003, this unit, composed of machinists, artists and jewelers, has been put in charge of designing and fashioning a wide array of medals.
These include the Order of Sikatuna, Order of Lakandula, Quezon Cross, Gawad Mabini, Golden Heart, Philippine Legion of Honor and Medal of Merit.
One of the toughest challenges came when Ms Arroyo ordered medals for state leaders, foreign affairs officials and ambassadors attending the ASEAN summit on counter-terrorism in Cebu in January 2007 less than a month before the conference.
Apart from having little time to make less than 200 medals, the medal-makers had to start from scratch since there was no existing model for this type of medal.
Denim uniform
“We had to do it. What the President wants, the President gets,” Roque, wearing a denim bush jacket and pants (the standard working clothes in the BSP), said in an interview last Thursday at the BSP building lobby.
For a week, he designed and devised a jig, and used it to drill a hole through several pieces of a medal in one go so that they’ll all fit together by the time they reach the end of the assembly line. He called this the drilling jig.
“Before we used to put a hole on the pieces one by one. It was a long and tedious process,” he said. “Besides, when we put these pieces together interchangeably, they didn’t usually fit.”
Silver coated with gold
The more ornate a medal is, the more pieces it has, and the more days it takes to finish it. All BSP medals are made of silver but are coated with 24-karat gold.
Roque, now a refinery officer IV, also made another jig to fold bar pins, which accompany medals, to a uniform size. This could fold 100 pins in three hours, beating the old process of 100 pieces in 16 hours.
He also made other jigs to make rosettes and sunbursts at a faster rate. The latter is called the sunburst fixture.
“We beat the deadline,” he said. “But we had to work overtime here, and spend the night here to finish them.”
The jigs or fixtures, 80 percent of which were made from scrap metal, won him a second “employee of the year” citation.
“If they use my devices, that alone gives me happiness. This award from the CSC is just the icing on the cake,” said Roque.
He is taking up a master’s degree in industrial education at Roosevelt College in Marikina in the hope of teaching in college someday.
