First day in the engineering fabrication shop

@gortnipper - wow, a small Nuttall - Here in Aus, Hercus (SouthBend Clone) mostly did that size (schools way back in my day) & Nuttall's on the S/H market were real heavy duty stuff.
 
rwalker28 said:
Lathes and mills - good stuff. But I gotta say it, I have worked in factories my whole life and seen a couple of pretty bad incidents (we dont call them accidents anymore.) Make sure you get your PPE in place and never risk cutting corners on wearing it even one time and get good training. But I am sure you know that. I say this with the best intentions.
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Big Chuck's take no prisoners!
 
kommando said:
And remember to get a calibrated bubble, none of the uncalibrated rubbish ;)
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As a side note you can have great fun with an engineer's level if you have a mate that's a builder or chippy
Let them set something up level with their level, and then put an engineer's level on it!!
 
I never got on with that lad's ball busting routine. Never saw the humour in it. I'm amazed somebody would hit a kid/apprentice. If that happened to me he would be down at the Labour Department answering hard questions, that if I didn't cold cock him next time his back was turned.
The other routine was the older hands refusing to help or teach the new fellows anything. It was considered to be hard won knowledge and job security. God bless the one's who remembered how hard it was to be young and were kind and willing to teach.
Think of the things you can teach yourself rather quickly just from this list or off you tube. It is amazing and a good thing.
 
We'd sometimes send a new guy up to the flight deck with a trash bag to "get an APU exhaust sample" not during flight ops though. Usually they'd come back and cuss us out. Then they weren't so new any more. The younger guys are sort of missing out on some of that Hijinks, everyone seems so worried about being politically correct, shame really
 
Nothing wrong with broaching providing you're not stuck doing it for days on end.....
 
Onder said:
I never got on with that lad's ball busting routine. Never saw the humour in it. I'm amazed somebody would hit a kid/apprentice. If that happened to me he would be down at the Labour Department answering hard questions, that if I didn't cold cock him next time his back was turned.
The other routine was the older hands refusing to help or teach the new fellows anything. It was considered to be hard won knowledge and job security. God bless the one's who remembered how hard it was to be young and were kind and willing to teach.
Think of the things you can teach yourself rather quickly just from this list or off you tube. It is amazing and a good thing.
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I can assure you he didn't hit him hard ,just enough to make him jump
Also nobody repeat nobody to my knowledge ever didn't help out an apprentice if he needed help
 
baz said:
Also nobody repeat nobody to my knowledge ever didn't help out an apprentice if he needed help
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Me too, I was surprised by Onders comment on that to be honest.

In fact, in my experience its quite the opposite, the old boys are so keen to impart knowledge that the young uns get tired of it!
 
Fast Eddie said:
Me too, I was surprised by Onders comment on that to be honest.

In fact, in my experience its quite the opposite, the old boys are so keen to impart knowledge that the young uns get tired of it!
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It can be a problem sometimes when the older blokes overload the lads with information tbh
One tells him one way one tells him another and so on
Usually there are several ways of arriving at the same thing
 
Where I did my apprenticeship we knew the tricks before we left the 1 week office based induction and so could avoid them.

But no amount of lectures could prepare us for walking through the Sewing Dept unescorted !!!!!!
 
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Too right kommnado...

My apprenticeship was as a HVAC engineer. Used to do a lot of industrial stuff.
Hosiery was a big industry in my neck of the woods back then.
Frankly, it was a remarkable experience.
Where’s the ‘me too’ movement for historic cases by rough randy old birds against skinny innocent young lads ?!?
 
Well we all experienced what we experienced. I wasn't an apprentice just a kid starting out perhaps that made the difference. Only expendable labour. Suspect you fellows were higher on the ladder in terms of the sort of job you were preparing for. As I noted,
I tip my hat to the old guys who were willing to sort things out for me. The whole "hazing" thing is now history and good that it is.
 
I was lucky, I only ever did jobs which genuinely interested me. I worked mainly in large engineering factories as a scientist. The best job I had was in the Government Aircraft Factories at Fishermans; Bend in Victoria. In those days, I was still road racing regularly and I always built my own race bikes. So the capabilities of those factories were put to good purpose by me. I can use most machine shop equipment fairly well, but I usually look for somebody who has got the fingers, to do a job properly.
 
I worked in the Ordnance Factory, Maribyrnong for 15 years. Foreigners were the best products that ever came out of that factory. But I was silly, If you had a project and took it to the planning section, you could put it through as a legitimate job for a very small fee. If I had thought about it, I would have made a billet crank out of gun barrel steel. My problem was my job was too stressful, so I was never flippant.
 
When I first started playing with motorcycles, I used to farm out any machining or welding I needed. For rough stuff, I used to go to a guy who built trailers. For fine stuff, I used to go to a guy who made dies for injection moulding of plastic. In the town in which I now live, there are still 3 engineering shops. One of them is a waste of space, the other two are excellent. If I lived in Melbourne these days, I would have trouble finding any machine shop which does jobbing work.
 
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