Did anyone here who did an engineering degree or an engineering apprenticeship ever have to endure 'filing school'? This is where students during their first year are sent to a workshop for 6 weeks to get an understanding of what it takes to get a 2" x 2" x 5" solid piece of mild steel (generally rusted and pitted) all sides square, shiny and perfect. Over 6 weeks, we made numerous useless items that served as paperweights or just went in the bin. The only tools at your disposal would be files, set squares, compasses, callipers, and nothing else. Our cohort did V slots (try filing a perfect 1.5" deep 45-degree V slot 5" long into a solid metal bar 😀 ), square grooves, half-round sides etc. I'd say this was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life (oh, the other is when my SWMBO insists she is right and I am wrong). The tutors would be walking around yelling and insulting everyone - just like the military. A few of us had our efforts hurled out the workshop door and told to start again.
Real old-school stuff.
Real old-school stuff.
I don't think any university level in Germany has it now. But my young friend, who does mechanical apprenticeship (Ausbildung Mechaniker in German), has to do it as first course of the study. But he said the tutor is quite nice, even though still demanding about all the perfection. I always wonder this kind of thing is not a task for doing something, but just to test the patience attitude of student.
Not in my electrical curriculum. I do recall stressing concrete. That better describes my high school experience back when it had a rimfire rifle range in the basement. IOW long, long ago.
Bonsai, I need to ask: Where did you go to school that beating up on a piece of mild steel was part of the curriculum?
South Africa. Along, a long, long, time ago. About 2 months after I finished filing school I did 1 year compulsory military service. Filing school was a kind of prep for that ha ha
Character building to say the least 😀
I remember a "Material Sciences" class that was very good actually, and covered the properties of materials that were cast, rolled or extruded. Don't recall that there was any lab work associated with that however.
Glad you survived your early experiences with "drill sargents". Closest I came to that was the Nuns in grade school that were probably from the "Order of the Iron Cross". Certainly loved their rulers...
Glad you survived your early experiences with "drill sargents". Closest I came to that was the Nuns in grade school that were probably from the "Order of the Iron Cross". Certainly loved their rulers...
We had that kind of "practical exercise" classes in the secondary school. We had to file a hammer head, and I remember a candlestick doggie, the candle was stuck on its upright tail... The teacher announced the task and disappeared for the rest of the class.
Yes, it was a pre-apprenticeship Diesel Mechanic course I took when I was 18. We had to file a "V" block from scratch. I still have it in my tool box. A real time waster. You'd never do this in an engineering course. Half the class wouldn't show up after the first week. 😆
jeff
Interestingly, one of our tutors was an old German guy called Walter - long gone by now. Hard as nails on us. He squirted oil up onto the florescent tube and it shattered 😂😂😂
😂😂😂😂 I had no choice. If I didn’t show up I’d be AWOL and thrown off course.
Actually, that would have happened to the students that were sponsored thru EI. Also, some of them were older, so they had more incentive to stick it out.
jeff
Yes, workshop class, second year IIRC of a four year degree course.
First year was common to all branches, girls doing computer courses would end up making casting patterns, and hammering hot metal in the smithy class ...totally irrelevant to their main subject.
We used to think one day one of the 35 kilo girls would fall backwards when using a 10 kilo hammer, never happened, though.
Second year was wood turning, drilling, tapping, filing, similar minor stuff. And soldering sheet metal after bending.
Third year shop was metal turning, shaping, drilling, milling, and arc welding.. And turning threads to match ready nuts, had to be careful with the dimensions...nuts were to be not tight nor loose.
In fourth year class, we milled gears in cast iron, after turning them, including bevel gears, where taper had to be accurate.
Final year exam was to design and machine a gear (two teeth only) after machining a bar to the required dimensions, so turning and horizontal milling were both to be done, we had 150 minutes for the task.
This was more experience than in most engineering colleges in our country at that time...I finished in 1989.
First year was common to all branches, girls doing computer courses would end up making casting patterns, and hammering hot metal in the smithy class ...totally irrelevant to their main subject.
We used to think one day one of the 35 kilo girls would fall backwards when using a 10 kilo hammer, never happened, though.
Second year was wood turning, drilling, tapping, filing, similar minor stuff. And soldering sheet metal after bending.
Third year shop was metal turning, shaping, drilling, milling, and arc welding.. And turning threads to match ready nuts, had to be careful with the dimensions...nuts were to be not tight nor loose.
In fourth year class, we milled gears in cast iron, after turning them, including bevel gears, where taper had to be accurate.
Final year exam was to design and machine a gear (two teeth only) after machining a bar to the required dimensions, so turning and horizontal milling were both to be done, we had 150 minutes for the task.
This was more experience than in most engineering colleges in our country at that time...I finished in 1989.
Two teeth was to check we knew how to use the indexing head, all the kids got different dimensions, so different sets of holes on the indexing heads...could not copy, single student per assignment, it was graduation class.
The institute (college) is still highly ranked on an all India level, started in 1962, now an independent university.
The institute (college) is still highly ranked on an all India level, started in 1962, now an independent university.
2nd year of Electronics Engineering Technology (1983) we had a machine shop course that included making a C-Clamp that required cutting external threads using a lathe and those threads had to work with tapped threads in a C-clamp body that we each had to make. Also made a flange that was sealed by an O-ring and had to hold a vacuum to 10-6 torr in order to pass. Also the usual strength of materials and other interesting tidbits (induction heating for case hardening etc. and polishing/lapping). Good times
I failed out of junior college in my teens, spent a few years in electronics repair, then got a job at Motorola at age 20 with no formal education in electronics. Later, I went to college with intent to finish at 37 years old, collecting a bachelor's degree in computer engineering in three years. The arduous work that got you ridiculed by the teacher was writing computer programs in C or Pascal. I had a math teacher call me stupid in front of the whole class. For the rest of the three years, I used the name I. B. Stoopid on my assignments. Most of the other students were under 21 years old. They started calling me Stoopid, so it stuck.
If that wasn't enough, I returned for a masters degree in electrical engineering at age 41. Nowhere along that trip was I required to hammer, file, or otherwise modify a piece of metal....other than soldering. The first Computer Engineering degree required the design and building of two "senior projects," one analog and the other digital, preferably microprocessor based. My analog project was a car stereo amp that shook the parking lot. 80 watts into a 15 inch woofer plus four 30 watt channels to a speaker in each door will do that. I chose to modify a cast aluminum BUD box to use it as the case for my amp. The digital project was an MC68HC11 based electronic fuel injection controller. I never made a case for it. No projects were required for the masters degree. We did a lot of EE simulations on a Sun Sparc II workstation. We had Sparc 10's at work, so I used them for my homework. I did teach the class how to solder and blow up electrolytic capacitors with a power supply.
If that wasn't enough, I returned for a masters degree in electrical engineering at age 41. Nowhere along that trip was I required to hammer, file, or otherwise modify a piece of metal....other than soldering. The first Computer Engineering degree required the design and building of two "senior projects," one analog and the other digital, preferably microprocessor based. My analog project was a car stereo amp that shook the parking lot. 80 watts into a 15 inch woofer plus four 30 watt channels to a speaker in each door will do that. I chose to modify a cast aluminum BUD box to use it as the case for my amp. The digital project was an MC68HC11 based electronic fuel injection controller. I never made a case for it. No projects were required for the masters degree. We did a lot of EE simulations on a Sun Sparc II workstation. We had Sparc 10's at work, so I used them for my homework. I did teach the class how to solder and blow up electrolytic capacitors with a power supply.
In the December before I started my apprenticeship, I was getting caned for smoking at school, not finishing my history homework or some other minor infraction. Within a few weeks of starting the apprenticeship in January, we each built a tube based SW/MW radio. It took about a month, but our electronics tutor was very kindly old guy. We had to calculate all the coil values, capacitance etc and wind the power transformers, drill and punch the chassis etc. Lots of amazed young faces when, after a bit of alignment and debugging, the radios came to life. We were even allowed to smoke (luckily I gave up years later) and grow our hair - this was 1973. Filing school came about three half months after this. It was around this time I got into serious trouble for swearing over the public address system. I wasn’t bad but I was full of sh1t.
Our high school had a three year long vocational electronics program that essentially taught TV repair, which got me a job in a TV repair shop while still in school. The Dade County (Miami) public school system was very under funded in the 1960's, so our textbooks were from the early 1950's and our lab work was "working on stuff" donated by the Homestead Air Force Base and a few private companies. The school had a policy whereby a student could claim a donated piece and take it home if they fixed it upon paying for the cost of the parts needed for the repair. Parts pulled from other discards were free. I had claimed an old Stromberg Carlson PA amp and turned it into "the loudest guitar amp on the planet." Things that used 4 X 6L6 and 2 X 5U4 were not common in 1969. This school was where I learned how to melt vacuum tubes and blow stuff up......How many Eico 0 to 400 volt power supplies could you wire together to make parts disappear?
Our teacher let the better students get away with all sorts of things that were violations of the rules, and he was in on the "big one" that we planned for the last day of school in our senior year (1970). We connected a portable Panasonic cassette player up to the Stromberg which had a long pair of wires fitted with alligator clips on the ends. A ladder was placed where we could access the big clock / speaker up on the wall where the school principal greeted the students with his presence every morning at 8 AM. We connected the 70 volt line output of our Stromberg to the transformer in the speaker box and as soon as the principal had completed his goodbye message to all the graduating seniors, we cranked Jimi Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled Banner at full power to the school. It turned out that we only reached the vocational wing (one of four) of the school, but it brought a very winded assistant principal to the electronics class in record time. The entire class was sitting in our desks with no evidence of any wrongdoing present when he burst through the door yelling. It seems that the electronics class, or the automotive repair class were the two that were always responsible for all the trouble. The other 8 classes were all good students, except maybe the sheet metal guys with the big welders and cutters.
I was taught how to file properly, and use metal working and wood working tools properly, in high school. We had great teachers.
I now think back about the quality of the tools we had and the fully stocked metal and wood stores and realise things were good back then.
We had a number of quality full size metal and wood lathes and all kinds of great stuff, like a huge water stone to sharpen tools. The benches were proper industrial quality and I remember the soldering benches with gas powered heaters for those large copper irons, which we used to solder tinned sheet steel items we'd made. All the tools were first grade Australian, British or American made, and kept in perfect condition. I remember nothing was stolen either, which would never happen nowadays.
I learned a lot of stuff that's still useful now. I still have two centre punches I made at school, some 45 years ago.
Nowadays there is no chance this extravagance would be funded. Sad.
I now think back about the quality of the tools we had and the fully stocked metal and wood stores and realise things were good back then.
We had a number of quality full size metal and wood lathes and all kinds of great stuff, like a huge water stone to sharpen tools. The benches were proper industrial quality and I remember the soldering benches with gas powered heaters for those large copper irons, which we used to solder tinned sheet steel items we'd made. All the tools were first grade Australian, British or American made, and kept in perfect condition. I remember nothing was stolen either, which would never happen nowadays.
I learned a lot of stuff that's still useful now. I still have two centre punches I made at school, some 45 years ago.
Nowadays there is no chance this extravagance would be funded. Sad.