B
Bogstandard
Guest
I am going to refer to this post
http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php?topic=1479.0
This is exactly what we need in our hobby today, people that are willing to learn our art, YOUNGSTERS especially, but where does the definition of youngster end?
If each one of us engine producers could manage to teach just one person, whether young or old, a few of our skills, then soon we would have a thriving model engine community.
Young Shane here is to be congratulated in making the effort to get away from the easy, come easy go culture of today. Turning his hand to MAKING something, a thing almost forgotten in the younger generation.
I was talking to some of the older guys at a steam rally last year, and they were saying that it is very difficult to recruit young engine makers outside of the immediate family, they just have no insight into how things work and how they are made, all that interests them is if they can afford to buy a finished article.
I went another way, and used the technology available to teach someone.
The person I taught is now a member of this site, and everthing came about by chance, by him wanting to build a model steam boat. To cut a long story short, he got interested in what I was doing (remember this was all done by email), he already had a small chinese lathe, but not much success with it, and we attempted, by me making bits, and sending them by post to see if we could turn his small bench drill into a miller (another long story) but he finally ended up with a small miller, on my recommendations. He has now gone from strength to strength, at one time it was two or three times a day by email, he was asking me how he should do something, and I was giving him the answers as to how I would do it. He asked when he needed new tooling, and I gave him advice on that, so that even without it, he should be able to do it manually, just that the tooling made life a lot easier and more accurate. No frivolous purchases, just what was needed when it was required.
Now it is just the odd email when he gets really stuck. The feeling I get when he tells me he has had success cannot be described, it is like me rediscovering how I did things many years ago, and it brings back the joy that I felt then.
I think he is building his fifth engine now, a v-twin, poppet valve, scaled up to twice the size, and he is getting on great, and now, as far as I am concerned is well on the way to becoming a model producer in his own right.
I have only ever spoken to him once on the phone, many moons ago, and have never met him, but hopefully sometime this year I will. He is older than myself, but that makes no difference, maybe he can pass a little bit on. He now admits to having a passion for making things out of metal, with all the joys and frustrations that that entails.
Without counting back all the hundreds of emails that have been sent between us, it must be about two or three years since we started this jouney together. To hopefully, not the final conclusion, but to a friendship built up using latest technology, to pass over old styled information that has benefitted us both.
So what this message is all about, we don't have to do it in the same workshop, we have the means nowadays to pass information on to anyone that requires it, to get them to a stage where they can say they are enjoying what they are doing.
The basics and getting started are the hard parts, once people have that information, they can usually sort out the difficult bits by themselves, or with maybe a little extra help from ourselves.
Pretty soon I can see me looking for another internet 'apprentice'.
John
