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OT: VolunTOLD to teach a class on Precision Maintenance. Where to start?

i_r_machinist

Titanium
Joined
Apr 12, 2007
Location
Dublin Texas
Just Googled it. We already do all that. I think our management is confusing Precision Maintenance with "Teach the mechanics some machine shop basics". so...
Where to start?
not having fun
i_r_
 
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An opportunity to school them on when to stop messing with it and call you to fix it right. That's a good thing.

Chip

Prezacltly!

First two semesters of "Business law" for non-Law students?

Main value is to demonstrate the complexity of it so the student stays TF out of 'basic' felony-by-accident trouble and knows much better when to contact a lawyer.
 
Good luck.....

I'm over eight years in a mine and believe me, it's been a cluster fuck the entire trip.........

Every field job is a classroom, you must be consistent with them on: What we're going to do and Why we're going to do it this way...

Only a few will get it, start with the basics (Think BABY STEPS) and walk them through the rest.
 
I would ask why? Is it because they are butchering things that more skilled hands could repair, necessitating purchasing replacement parts leading to higher costs and longer down time? Or is it because they want them to make their own simple replacement parts and modifications as to not tie up tool room people? Need more info.
 
Repeat after me "I know that I don't know"
And when you say this, call someone who does.
 
VolunTOLD is exactly how I get my apprentices. I pick out some projects and we kinda build them together. Starting with a tool post for the Hardinge so they don't have to use mine anymore.

I don't do any classroom stuff, just machining so we pick projects and I explain things as we go, them do the work me watching them like a bird dog in the beginning.

Works well with only one, no clue how many you'll have? I don't know if any of that helps it's how I kinda cover the basics.

Brent
 
First, assess what they do and do not appear to know. And believe. Know is obvious. By believe I mean the sort of person who understands a torque wrench just fine, but doesn't believe they need to use it, and when say a cement anchor pulls out of 8000psi cement, there must be some mystery cause unrelated to their use of an 8 foot cheater bar.

(By the way, I've learned lots from books, and of course lots from Practical Machinist, and lot of learn by doing... I do not mean sound somehow special expert.)

Second, take what Willeo says above and carry it further - people overfilling bearings with too much grease? Why? Is there a chart that says how much to use? Pictures of too little, just right, and too much? That level of thing.

Third, a race mechanic school I knew of, and the robotics clubs I host now, spend a lot of time on things like "if you put a really long wrench on a tiny screw you will just break it" and "you must consult a chart to select the tap drill, the #8 drill is NOT the tap drill for the #8 bolt" and so forth...



Remember that *you* most likely know lots of things those being trained don't know, AND you don't know you know them, nor where you learned them.
 
Precision maintenance classes?

I'd be good at that. I'd have a table full of motor end bells with worn bearing journals. On the left would be a tooled up lathe. On the right would be 10 bottles of Loctite. I'd stand behind the table with a 6' long piece of 1" PVC pipe. Then I ask the students to fix the worn bearing journal. My job is to mercilessly beat the first guy who reaches for the Loctite.

For the next lesson, I'd hand each guy a huge tube of RTV silicon. Then I'd have them glue the bloody hell out of a pair of nice clean machined flanges. Then I'd bring in a pair that was glued up back in 1997 tell them to go ahead and take the flanges apart. Oh, and I'd hide all the hammers.

Then I would have a 40 hour lesson where I literally just repeated "it'll last forever, but you have to put oil in it".
 
I would ask why? Is it because they are butchering things that more skilled hands could repair, necessitating purchasing replacement parts leading to higher costs and longer down time? Or is it because they want them to make their own simple replacement parts and modifications as to not tie up tool room people? Need more info.

The skilled hands part. For the last 15+ years management has been under the impression that if you have a step by step proceedure on how to work on a component, you don't need to have a five or ten year overlap between the seasoned craftsman and a new hire.
Proceedures are fine, but I have yet to see one that say, "Look at the bottom of the new pump feet. Remove paint"

I've been instructed to teach a class and lab on how to drill out a broken fastener. I guess I'll start with a lesson on the basics of threads and go from there.

Repeat after me "I know that I don't know"
And when you say this, call someone who does.
I'm going to use that.
not having fun
i_r_
 
Just Googled it. We already do all that. I think our management is confusing Precision Maintenance with "Teach the mechanics some machine shop basics". so...
Where to start?
not having fun
i_r_

.
i worked in maintenance. my guess is boss sees bill for machine shop to make parts. he sees maintenance guys caught up with maintenance jobs and he figures why cant i have them make parts when they are caught up with their regular maintenance work. plus some parts they can modify design to make it last longer.
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it started with a few parts and after 6 years i had a big pile of drawings of parts to make in my spare time. boss was happy he was saving money by having his people who's time was already paid for to make parts. actually i did same at a job before that too after about 5 years same thing i had pile of drawings of parts to make in my spare time.
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Wednesday to Friday i made parts in machine shops. it started with just Friday but as i improved equipment and it ran better i had more time in the shop as i had less maintenance work to do
 
The skilled hands part. For the last 15+ years management has been under the impression that if you have a step by step proceedure on how to work on a component, you don't need to have a five or ten year overlap between the seasoned craftsman and a new hire.
_


Some things never change and it is only funny because I don't have to put up with it anymore. My story comes from the late 1980's. A closing of other plants of a world wide company gave us way more machines and work than skilled hands to run them. We had open space so facilities in Canada and other USA locations moved in with us, but a lot of the workers did not move. A dim wit out of touch high level manager concocted the idea of groups of the top workers in each department writing training manuals so "unskilled" temps could be "set-up operators" with just a day of reading and referencing the book while working.

Basically the real department heads were the working leadmen like myself, supervisors did nothing but attend meetings and plaster pie charts on their office walls. Most of them knew little of the functioning of the machines
in the departments they supervised. When my supervisor brought the idea of me collecting a few guys and spending a week writing a training manual he was met with hysterical laughter. Always playing with 5 fouls (In the NBA #6 gets you ejected) I went right to the office of Mr high level manager and gave him the riot act. Instruction manuals were never written.

Rant off I think the best thing to do in the OP's case is make every maintenance ticket a learning experience for a set amount of time. Have one guy do the repair while his fellow maintenance techs watched and a skilled machinist with mechanical or needed knowledge points out what areas are critical to the parts function and what not to do during disassembly. An example would be someone striking the end of a shaft directly with a sledge hammer to drive it out of it's location. Writing a book on the do's and do not's on each situation or demonstrating them for every machine in the shop would take 3 lifetimes.
 
Some things never change and it is only funny because I don't have to put up with it anymore. My story comes from the late 1980's. A closing of other plants of a world wide company gave us way more machines and work than skilled hands to run them. We had open space so facilities in Canada and other USA locations moved in with us, but a lot of the workers did not move. A dim wit out of touch high level manager concocted the idea of groups of the top workers in each department writing training manuals so "unskilled" temps could be "set-up operators" with just a day of reading and referencing the book while working.

Basically the real department heads were the working leadmen like myself, supervisors did nothing but attend meetings and plaster pie charts on their office walls. Most of them knew little of the functioning of the machines
in the departments they supervised. When my supervisor brought the idea of me collecting a few guys and spending a week writing a training manual he was met with hysterical laughter. Always playing with 5 fouls (In the NBA #6 gets you ejected) I went right to the office of Mr high level manager and gave him the riot act. Instruction manuals were never written.

Rant off I think the best thing to do in the OP's case is make every maintenance ticket a learning experience for a set amount of time. Have one guy do the repair while his fellow maintenance techs watched and a skilled machinist with mechanical or needed knowledge points out what areas are critical to the parts function and what not to do during disassembly. An example would be someone striking the end of a shaft directly with a sledge hammer to drive it out of it's location. Writing a book on the do's and do not's on each situation or demonstrating them for every machine in the shop would take 3 lifetimes.

many people resist writing work instructions or procedures as they fear for their job. i often wrote procedures as others refused. eventually boss got rid of people who gave him a hard time. boss kept people around who did what they were told to do with less argument.
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but eventually when i lost job after 32 years it took me 3 weeks to find another job and after a few years i was making more money than the old job. its not the end of the world loosing a job. actually often its a good time to decide what job you actually want to do. many people never change jobs and really hate their job. they feel trapped. there a certain freedom from choosing a different job that will make you more happy.
 
many people resist writing work instructions or procedures as they fear for their job. i often wrote procedures as others refused. eventually boss got rid of people who gave him a hard time. boss kept people around who did what they were told to do with less argument.
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but eventually when i lost job after 32 years it took me 3 weeks to find another job and after a few years i was making more money than the old job. its not the end of the world loosing a job. actually often its a good time to decide what job you actually want to do. many people never change jobs and really hate their job. they feel trapped. there a certain freedom from choosing a different job that will make you more happy.

You can't be serious. I was basically asked to write a book that would make a shoe salesman into a class A machinist in a couple days. It was an impossible task, no one feared losing their job. Whether you wanted to or not I take your comments as a big insult.
 
Speaking of voluntold in two weeks I get to school people on the correct physical installation of 1200 hp motors, gearboxes..........conveyor pulley and fix the screwed up structure.;.......Was told if I was off that day , they would hunt me down to fix it....,.......What a messed up day........

Chances are I'll have anywhere from 6-10 helpers .....uh mechanics....
 
You can't be serious. I was basically asked to write a book that would make a shoe salesman into a class A machinist in a couple days. It was an impossible task, no one feared losing their job. Whether you wanted to or not I take your comments as a big insult.


Oh come off it Dualkit,I know what machines you were working on at that time and you know that I was working on the same machines. I would say that I could write a 1000 page instruction manual in ten minutes flat(and that includes a fifteen minute tea break).There you go,job jobbed.


At the time I had crossed the aisle to the CNCs, but was still involved with the cam machines. There actually was an isle dividing the two in the large department. I don't think 1,000 pages would have been enough probably 10,000 might not be, they wanted all the machines covered. We had 3 distinctly different CNC types. As for cam machines we had various models of single spindle Bechlers, Tornos, and Brown and Sharpes including the fancy MS-7 Tornos with back working, front and back cross working, slotting and all that good stuff. We also had coil fed Escomatics, six spindle Acmes and Tornos AS-14s plus various cold heading machines whose brands I forget.
 








 
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