Obsolete skills
Discussion
Panel beating
- black magic. I once watched a guy cut out a very large nasty gash in a bare aluminium body (about 2/3rds of the front wing needed to be removed). Fabricate a new piece for a wing with creases and compound curves etc in just the right places. Then tack it in place, level it all up, seam weld and grind it back. You wouldn't know, it was a perfect job!
The other is plug making-
At work there is a group of guys who make the most complex shapes and forms you can think of out of ply, to then create the mould to manufacture GRP panels. These guys are literally wizards and you wouldn't even believe that the stuff they make is even possible when you see the raw materials they start out with. I'm talking seriously shapely consoles and dashboards, window liners etc. Very impressive. Its not quite the same when it comes off a big 5 axis milling machine!
- black magic. I once watched a guy cut out a very large nasty gash in a bare aluminium body (about 2/3rds of the front wing needed to be removed). Fabricate a new piece for a wing with creases and compound curves etc in just the right places. Then tack it in place, level it all up, seam weld and grind it back. You wouldn't know, it was a perfect job!
The other is plug making-
At work there is a group of guys who make the most complex shapes and forms you can think of out of ply, to then create the mould to manufacture GRP panels. These guys are literally wizards and you wouldn't even believe that the stuff they make is even possible when you see the raw materials they start out with. I'm talking seriously shapely consoles and dashboards, window liners etc. Very impressive. Its not quite the same when it comes off a big 5 axis milling machine!
Mine is coach painting, proper job with brushes and oil based coach paint, with lots and lots of flatting down by hand between coats.
Re map reading, mountain rescue complained recently of the demise of proper map reading skills. People using smartphones and and gps not planning proper routes and avoiding difficult areas, plus not having a print map to get them out of trouble, especially in case of malfunction or flat battery.
Re map reading, mountain rescue complained recently of the demise of proper map reading skills. People using smartphones and and gps not planning proper routes and avoiding difficult areas, plus not having a print map to get them out of trouble, especially in case of malfunction or flat battery.
Manipulating exposure factors manually for x-rays, being able to set kVp, mA and time separately to change the contrast and penetration. Also being able to do auto-tomography by setting a very long exposure time with a low mA to blur out ribs when xraying a thoracic spine.
Also the ability to create exposure factors by extrapolating from a single known exposure.
Rendered completely obsolete by modern x-ray sets where you literally push the button for the bit you need to x-ray and by modern Digital Radiography where if you dont like the contrast you can just fiddle with it on the screen.
I reckon I could still walk into any x-ray room anywhere and create a usable set of exposures for any body part if you gave me a standard knee exposure, a chest exposure and an abdo exposure.
Really obsolete skill for me now as I dont use the evil rays anymore I use a bloody big magnet to scan people
Also the ability to create exposure factors by extrapolating from a single known exposure.
Rendered completely obsolete by modern x-ray sets where you literally push the button for the bit you need to x-ray and by modern Digital Radiography where if you dont like the contrast you can just fiddle with it on the screen.
I reckon I could still walk into any x-ray room anywhere and create a usable set of exposures for any body part if you gave me a standard knee exposure, a chest exposure and an abdo exposure.
Really obsolete skill for me now as I dont use the evil rays anymore I use a bloody big magnet to scan people
rohrl said:
In my school we had to use fountain pens. No biros allowed.
This was true for me at prep school, but I carried on using a fountain pen at secondary school (as did many others). The favourite childhood trick was how a Lamy Safari pen would go 'head-over-heels' when toppled over thanks to the shape of the clip.
dvs_dave said:
Six Sigma when the next b
ks fad comes along.
ks fad comes along.
The trouble is 6 sigma is actually a decent foundation for production engineering. The problem is the application.I had 10 years of it in a Jap company - you very rarely heard about 6 sigma per se, just did the work. I have reams of results and graphs showing real and definite improvements using this technique - that was part of the "looking at broken glass" comment earlier. I spent nearly 4 years doing just that as my main job. Travelled the world doing so, and became very very good at it. That project saved over 4 million pounds a year at fruition, for basically my salary - simply by a ruthless application of 6 sigma techniques.
More recently in both German and American companies, everyone speaks the language, and no bugger does the work - so it becomes a BS exercise. 3 years doing this at a USA company, and I could not honestly say there was any benefit what so ever.
Loved working in a Japanese company - just the level of technical understanding and desire to learn more was so alien to the philosophy in many of the UK / Europe / USA companies. So refreshing. (hard work mind)
AW111 said:
Ok, obsolete may have been an exaggeration, but I haven't seen anything but mig, and now tig, for a long time in light industrial use.
At my last place, the majority of welding carried out by the metal smith was stick welding. structural steel and lifting equipment mostly. Label repeats on Heidenhain CNC controls.
When I was learning on the TNC 145 control you only had 999 lines of code to play with and CAD/CAM was almost unhead of. This meant that you had to loop the program back on itself so you didn't run out of memory or wear the tip of your finger out re-entering the same lines of code for the following tool.
One of my best programs machined 32 grooves in a part with only 17 lines of code which confused a few people, no one else knew what an M94 was for
but my favourite was machining a hexagon, it looked like the control had locked up as it sat on the same line of code whilst it machined the part 
Now some bloke in an office copies a file across from the customer, presses a button or three and get several thousand lines of code, yes it's faster, yes it works first time but it lacks that certain style...
When I was learning on the TNC 145 control you only had 999 lines of code to play with and CAD/CAM was almost unhead of. This meant that you had to loop the program back on itself so you didn't run out of memory or wear the tip of your finger out re-entering the same lines of code for the following tool.
One of my best programs machined 32 grooves in a part with only 17 lines of code which confused a few people, no one else knew what an M94 was for
but my favourite was machining a hexagon, it looked like the control had locked up as it sat on the same line of code whilst it machined the part Now some bloke in an office copies a file across from the customer, presses a button or three and get several thousand lines of code, yes it's faster, yes it works first time but it lacks that certain style...
driverrob said:
I even learned how to do French Polishing at school. Now there's a dying art.
Not at all. There's a lot of antique furniture out there that will continue to need repair and restoration. A lot of woodworkers still like using shellac finishes too (not so much going to the full extent of french polishing, but a lot of the techniques are still used)
brickwall said:
rohrl said:
In my school we had to use fountain pens. No biros allowed.
This was true for me at prep school, but I carried on using a fountain pen at secondary school (as did many others). The favourite childhood trick was how a Lamy Safari pen would go 'head-over-heels' when toppled over thanks to the shape of the clip.
I think I still have a fountain pen somewhere.
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