Neanderpundit

I don’t have an engineering degree- though I do engineering work. I am an autodidact innalmost everything I’ve done, and that ability, to learn what I need to learn quickly, has served me well.

What I have done, is become an engineer the way engineers USED to be made, the way they’re educated to this day, in the UK.

IN this country, at the turn of the century, an engineer was a man capable of operating an engine, hence the term. When most people think “engine” they think “motor”, but that’s not what an engine is, an engine, strictly speaking, is a mechainism. Most people think of “internal combustion engine” or “steam engine” but those are just mechanisms used to convert one form of energy into another.

Consider the lathe. At one time, lathes were just things that turned. Most of what they did was let you cut or file or turn something that was round. Around 1810, Henry Maudslay invented a machine that combined the accuracy of Jesse Ramsden’s “dividing engine” with his rigid, accurate lathe.

THis created the engine lathe. There are still bucketloads of people who think that an engine lathe is used to make engines. An engine lathe is used to make accurate cuts on metal, both inside and outside diameter, and most importantly, cut threads. Up to this time, most threads were cut by wrapping a piece of line around the part and the threads cut with a file. An engine lathe meant, that for ther very first time, threads coupd be accurately cut, and a thread made on one machine would fit a thread made on another.

Okay, you in the back, wake the fuck up.

Where I’m going wiht this little bit oif history, is that the engineering accomplisments of the last century were made, in the main, by talented amateurs. In some places, the smae is true today. No group of MIT educated programmers wrote Napster, it was a kid. Google wasn’t written by a huge conglomerate. The things that subtly change the world, come out of left field, more often than not, and nobody knows where the next one is coming from.

Frinstance: Years back, the Big Three experimented with turbine powered cars. In an era of big blocks, they weren’t well accepted. They were also engineering marvels, because of the brute force needed to take the high speed turbine output and turn it into something that the car could use. These days, I wonder why someone doesn’t apply that same tech to making a little hybrid. You could easily gear a turbine to a single speed generator, no accel/decel issues, use the generator to charge batteries, use the batteries to run the car. Old tech and new to make a third, different thing. No, I haven’t done the math, and it may be utterly impausible- but I do know that a turbine is more efficient than a recip, otherwise airplanes would still have propellors. THere are tons and tons of turnings in engineering, many we have never imagined- but someone someday will. And I’ll lay odds it’s not going to be a college professor that does it.

A few years back, an engineering colleague of mine went through the process of upgrading his degree, and when he did, I helped him with some of his labs. I was amazed at the things he was doing, and he got great grades for the class I helped him with. Turns out the piece I helped him make was something he invented off the cuff to test something at his plant, and he just had the idea and ran with it. The education he was getting made it easier to figure out the fine details, but basis of the idea was his, out of the blue, and worked perfectly.

I started this some time ago, and finally, on my lunch hour, got started copying some of my posts over here. Some old stuff, some newer, some of my best work, I think. I have more to move, but it’s a start. If you haven’t been reading for a long time, you might find some amusing stuff there.

When I was in school, I was pretty lucky to have had the benefit of what is now considered a “classical” education. I went to an all-male school, in which we learned certain things by rote, when that was appropriate, read the classic literature (Homer, not Salinger) in the original where appropriate, and corporal punishment was meted out with equal vigor for academic failure as well as for bad behavior.

Trust me when I tell you: I got a lot of asswhippings.

Academically, I wasn’t up to the standard of that school, for a variety of reasons, the most common being attention span. I could do really well for the first nine days of school, and I wanted to be off hunting or fishing or something other than sitting in a classroom with a scratchy suit on. So I drifted. Didn’t pay atention. Didn’t like homework.

Anything I applied myself to, I did well. I got a’s effortlessly. I hated history(freaky, becuase I LOVE it now) I hated english. (we had to read the dumbest goddamned books) I HATED just about every subject there was, with the exception of chemistry and physics. FOr Chemistry, we had Father Ed Frizzell. He was tack sharp, and knew his chem back and forth. Physics was Father Moskal, an aging patriarch who had actually started the school, and I learned most physics from him- before I was in class. When I got to my senior year, which is when we took physics, we had Wayne Woolford. I swear to god, Wayne wore tweed underwear. he had a little book marked off in quarters of an hour for each student (12) and would mark “NIS” (not in seat) if we were up and around (which was strictly verboten). He had about as much control over the class as a fart in a hurricane, and it showed. I did well in the class but not brilliantly. When Fr Moskal taught, he’d demonstrate principles of physics by little homemade mechanisms, or cutaway/dismantled objects. Fired up a small gasoline engine in class to demonstrate it’s principles, and from it the class learned more than all the diagrams in textbooks could ever tell.

Wayne, on the other hand, relied entirely on the text, and it was a drag. I always regretted not having Physics until the year after Fr moskal retired, but you have to do what you have to do, I guess.

Anyway, when I went to Purdue, I found that academically, I was about a year ahead of the students that had come from public schools.(though I was far from the first i my class in high school) I did most work with little effort, and frankly, had “boredom” added to the “short attention span”. And then I saw what Purdue was producing, as far as engineers were concerned. At that time, Inland Steel was hiring apprentice millwrights at $25k a year, starting pay, and Mechanical Engineers at $16k a year.

So I left, went to work at Inland, and let them pay for the balance of my engineering education.

I went through a millwrights program, where I learned to weld using stick, gmaw, tig, subarc, and a number of other disciplines. I learned pipefitting. Pipefitting seems like a stupid occupation, doesn’t it? Not so. A pipefitter does calculations in his head that would stagger a mathemetician, at times. I learned machine operation- I can run a lathe, a mill, a surface grinder, a blanchard grinder, a shaper, a planer, all sorts of stuff. I don’t consider myself a machinist, or a toolmaker, because in my mind it takes ten years to make a real machinist, and another twenty to make a toolmaker. Nothing but experience can give you those skills, no matter how good you are. I learned enough metallurgy to get by. I spent time working on, and had to learn to drive, just about eveyr kind of heavy equipment known to man, from little bobcats and loaders to huge cranes and forklifts capable of lifting a locomotive engine.

Since finishing that apprenticeship, I have continued to learn, and I always will- I know there is always something around the corner to learn, and where machines are concerned, I’m excited to do so.

Recently, I happened across a pile of old pictures that I had stashed away years ago, and though I had been under the impression I only had one picture of Dad (more on that jan 21) and now it seems I have another.

This particular day, less than a year before dad’s death, I had come down to visit. Dad was grilling chicken- that’s a bottle of marinade next to him there. Mom was gone and he and I sat in the yard and played with the dog, smelled the chicken, listened to the whippoorwills in the neighborhood, and talked. Dad never talked much, but whern he did, it was always worthwhile. Below the fold is the conversation, as I remember it.
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