The Craftmans Shop > Radio Control Models
Shoestring Racer
Stilldrillin:
How school life has changed.......
We were told to always carry a penknife. For sharpening chisel points on pencils etc.
Break time, many of us whittled propeller shapes from a stick of firewood.
Balanced across a finger, to find centre. Then drill a prop shaft (pencil) hole, with the blade point. Many lads had bloody fingers from the blade folding, at the wrong moment.
String wrapped around the shaft had the prop lifting off, several feet into the air. Lots of them, every playtime.......
All our practical skills developed from our school years.
David D
S. Heslop:
--- Quote from: vtsteam on November 18, 2013, 09:13:32 AM ---I just visited our local elementary school Friday all day long and sat in on classes as a member of the school board of directors. What I saw dismays me. I feel there is a great lack of manual skill development in our school systems. When I was a kid, probably 90 percent of boys I knew at least were building model airplanes. They could wield a hammer and hand saw, build a tree house or a skooter out of an orange crate and some wheels, etc. Now, children have almost no idea that they can use tools. Everything is a purchase. And I go to a place like Walmart and see no kits of planes or much else that you can build and paint. I see only shiny plastic gadgets.
Manual skill development has been relegated in high school to the lowest levels of education. Actually, it has been entirely eliminated. To me, manual skill development is one of the highest forms of education, and it is a great mistake to treat it as less important than other forms of learning. I think our culture is really making itself dependent in ways that are unsupportable, long term.
--- End quote ---
It wasn't that long ago that I was still in school, and as a mechanically minded kid it was real despairing. I went into secondary school with a keen interest in making things, having already made RC boats, tree houses, rafts, and all the other stuff kids make. They really sucked the enjoyment and satisfaction out of making things, and it didn't take long for me to lose enthusiasm for making things in general. Spending months designing a thing in cad programs, learning about various wood joint types from diagrams but never seeing a real example of one (let alone cut one out!). The big project was making a thing in software and getting to watch the technician set up the cnc router. By the end of it I probably forgot more than I'd learned.
It wasn't just technology though. We had a cookery class for a year and we got to bake a single pizza. The rest of it was about designing product packaging. We then got robbed out of the A level geography field trip (the weekend away getting drunk then trudging around muddy fields collecting data with a hangover) when the exam board decided to get rid of the coursework and make the subject 100% exams. So instead of going on a field trip we had to sit an exam about what we would have done had we gone on a field trip.
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to imagine it's all designed to squash any ambition in people. But it's probably just a mix of health and safety concerns and exams being easier to mark.
S. Heslop:
--- Quote from: vtsteam on November 18, 2013, 11:08:28 PM ---But they don't know it. They get trapped in thinking they don't know how to make things. That they're all thumbs. Or that only manufacturing plants can make things. Regular people can't make things. That's the thinking.
--- End quote ---
Something I found really difficult when I started getting interested in really making things again is just not knowing where to go to learn. One of the most valuable skills i've learned is how to spot bullcrap advise and information.
On alot of forums if you go in and say 'I want to learn woodworking!' everyone will come out of the woodwork and tell you that you desperately need to spend at least £200 on a Japanese pullsaw (how else are you going to cut all those essential hand dovetails!), get the entire stanley hand plane range, and my personal favourite "you should buy the most expensive tools right away because they'll last you a lifetime".
Then there's just plain mean spirited obfuscation to keep otherwise simple skills exclusive, which I feel Dave Gingery put best:
'This simple process has been referred to as the "Art of Hand scraping". It is well to remember that knowledge is generally passed on reluctantly. Those who know how want to maintain their superior position so they always try to make it as difficult as possible. It's up to you to discover the secret and avoid the diversions that such people want to set in your way.
The skill is so easy to acquire that it can hardly be called an "Art".'
There's a large community of people that 'make' stuff that call themselves Hackers or Makers. They're the same crowd of people that are going wild about 3d printers. They're in it for the self-image of being a smart person who makes cool gadgets, but don't really want to make stuff for its own sake. Naturally that involves not revealing too much about how a thing was actually made or how to learn what they know, as it might make them feel less special.
Not to insult the whole community, I know there's alot of canny people involved, but it caused me no end of frustration back when I was trying to actually learn how things are made. I really believed the crap and assumed I wasn't as smart as these people, or I needed a university education to make LEDs flash.
I stumbled on the model engineering community by chance when looking up how to rebore sprockets. It really amazed me just how honest and open everyone was about the stuff they made. Everything was presented clearly and in plain English.
I'm writing my lifes story! But I do feel it's tragic for anyone that wants to actually make stuff to get started when there's such a minefield of misinformation out there.
Meldonmech:
What a great build log, really interesting, I have not been involved in aircraft modelling since my early teans, when I was carving balsa wood aircraft. Was unaware they could be carved from foam, feel like having a go. Can't wait for the next episode.
Well Done David
vtsteam:
Sorry to have slowed down a little here -- the school board and school supervisory union budget (I'm on the finance committee for the district) and a multitude of meetings are just sapping time away from enjoyable stuff, but I'm hoping to move ahead with my model on the weekend. Sheesh, I'm supposed to be retired! The school stuff is all volunteer work.
Steve, sorry your manual skills and interest weren't encouraged back in school. That's really a shame, because I'm sure you weren't the only one who was discouraged. Some people thrive on CNC, CAD, etc. and that's great for them. Some want to build skills with a set of tools and with a hunk of materials in front of them, and that is very different. It's a different mindset, and often a different personality. Both are good. But they are not the same.
I believe both should be taught separately, and our educational system should recognize that different people have different orientations and so encourage those two kinds of people in appropriate ways. There is no one size fits all in education, though we seem to try to enforce it. A poor fit makes for frustration and discouragement. Both in machining and people.
Madmodders forum is a good example of the diversity of interest that can happen and yet combine into a community of creative work without the need to prove that one type of work, or tool, or material is better than another. It cuts across boundaries. People can appreciate work by others that they aren't actually interested in doing themselves. That's rare. I wish school systems could work on a similar principle of diversity and communal encouragement. I think people learn much more that way, not less. And more quickly.
I personally am oriented like you, Steve, not too interested in the Maker movement, or 3D printers, etc. I do own 2 CNC machines, one I built, including soldering up the circuit boards. But the interest was far more in making the tools than actually using them -- I'll spend hours on my manual lathe and mill, but get impatient doing CAD and the G-code for the router. That isn't my "fun" time.
But for others, it's great and inspiring to be able to produce a part automatically from a CAD rendering. We're all different. I like strawberry ice cream better than chocolate. I'm still friends with chocolate lovers.
Glad you found what you like, Steve! And why.
Meldonmech, John R, thank you guys! Promise to get back on it. I've got to make a better vacuum former for the cowl. First mistakes were: wrong material, wrong thickness, too small a margin around the part, too restricted vacuum entry, attachment staples placed inside the seal instead of outside, too small a total surface, part not spaced upwards enough.
In other words, almost every possible thing wrong, but improvable. The best kind of learning experience!
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