What is our responsibility to the next generation of manufacturing?

[john.k]

Its intersting to note while politics in the US is cemented to the course of enriching the already mega rich,that here ,its veering strongly to the left and socialism........the huge issue is housing ......young people have given up the hope of home ownership ,and just want to punish someone for it......the old ,the landlord,the conservative politician,the state........Im of the same view .....how is it possible house prices have risen tenfold in the last 20 years?......bankers have taken controll of the market ,to the detriment of everyone.

 

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

First you'll have to find members of the next generation that really want to learn the skills you have to pass on - and the best of luck of that score (you'll need it)

When I was winding down as an engineering technician in our local high school we had classes of 20 kids coming through the workshop. Maybe 3 groups per year.
Of those 20 you’d get 2 or 3 that I’d be happy to take on as an apprentice. Unfortunately most of those able ones wanted to do something else, medicine, the law etc. so you’d end up with maybe 3 or 4 out of 60.

Regards Tyrone

 

[Limy Sami]

When I was winding down as an engineering technician in our local high school we had classes of 20 kids coming through the workshop. Maybe 3 groups per year.
Of those 20 you’d get 2 or 3 that I’d be happy to take on as an apprentice. Unfortunately most of those able ones wanted to do something else, medicine, the law etc. so you’d end up with maybe 3 or 4 out of 60.

Regards Tyrone

And if they do take up trade training the drop out rate is high, I started my apprenticeship in 1971, with 12 in my class at tech, 4 years later (and IIRC) there were 7 left, 2 of whom failed their finals.

 

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

And if they do take up trade training the drop out rate is high, I started my apprenticeship in 1971, with 12 in my class at tech, 4 years later (and IIRC) there were 7 left, 2 of whom failed their finals.

I bumped into one of the good kids a few weeks back. He’d actually gone into plumbing, did that for a few years, got fed up and then started his own gardening business.
So that would be one less.

Regards Tyrone

 

[???]

Someone passed on the skills to me and I am morally obliged to pass them on to others who have the desire and aptitude.

However this does not apply to my processes. If I have spent countless hours developing a deep draw sequence and the required tooling and you ask me too teach you I will teach you the fundamentals of deep drawing and what machining processes are used to manufacture the tooling. But I will not share my draw reductions, press speeds, lubricants etc as they are proprietary.

 

[atex57]

Much like ??? above. I would like to pass on the knowledge and probably the shop to some one that shows an aptitude and willingness to work. Just don't want an outsider asking about the specifics on a couple of processes;

Ed.

 

[michiganbuck]

There are things a master knows and tell that one lifetime of experience can't discover.
I wish I could go back and talk to my grandfather.

 

[guythatbrews]

Two threads rolled into one here.

Masters passing on knowledge to apprentices and journeymen, and passing knowledge to your customers and competition.

The first is good. The second can really bite you.

I have worked with guys who thought everyone else in the company  was their competition. That's not a healthy viewpoint.

 

[Limy Sami]

Two threads rolled into one here.

Masters passing on knowledge to apprentices and journeymen, and passing knowledge to your customers and competition.

The first is good. The second can really bite you.

I have worked with guys who thought everyone else in the company  was their competition. That's not a healthy viewpoint.

I call it plain toxic, .....miind you, learn how their buttons are pressed and their paranoiah plays hell with them

 

[DanielG]

I have worked with guys who thought everyone else in the company  was their competition. That's not a healthy viewpoint.

Like much that is wrong, we may blame that in part on Jack Welch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve. Regardless of whether your company drank that bit of toxic kool-aid, it has affected employees' perception of optimal work behavior.

 

[EmGo]

Like much that is wrong, we may blame that in part on Jack Welch.

As a group, in the 80's the US really drank the poison, didn't we ? And never really recovered from that. Even a lot of posters here, today, are admirers of that kind of thinking.

 

[rjwalker1973]

Sorry to be long winded but here is my 99 cents. When i started in this industry 30 years ago I did not know anything and few wanted to teach me. So I read the manuals and watched programs run and figured a lot out on my own. Of course I messed up a lot along the way. I then went to work at a shop and met the guy that would be my mentor Benji. At first he did not like me. I was roughing jaws on a manual to be finished on the machine they was going to be assigned to. Nothing major just relieving the extra material on the backside and roughing bores to within .1. The finish guy just quit one day at lunch. Never came back. Ever. So they put me on finishing jaws . Said if I needed help ask Benjamin. I did. He looked at me and said " you the new hot shot around here figure it out". So I did. He came back thru and checked to see if I got them done and I told him yes. He took a look. Smiled. Slapped me on the shoulder and said " Let me show you a couple things to make it easier grasshopper". From that day forward to when he retired he would show me anything. Since those day I always try and pass what he taught me on to those that wants to learn. I can't take this head full of gibberish with me when I go ,so why try.

 

[texasgeartrain]

Is that really fair to him tho ? Maybe shouldn't you be telling him to go to Burger King and start working his way up ?

I had this talk with his father, who is a business friend. And we feel the 19 year olds are at knowledge and skill wise, where our generation was at 14-16 years old.

We had weekend and summer jobs doing hands on work during our high school years, "liability" was not in the forefront on so many minds.

I went to a vocation high school where we operated industrial machines at 14-18 years old.

Seems like a whole lot less of that now. I personally think lawyers with bullshit lawsuits, and insurance companies have had a large hand in ruining a lot of that.

 

[Covenant MFG]

From a 23 y/o...

Pretty sure the young guys who are hungry enough to learn will figure out a way to find the guys who know the skills needed. Almost everyone is too lazy to learn, or to teach, but the people who are hungry in either category end up finding each other. It seems to be a question of just whether or not someone has "moxie".

At the end of the day, I do think it's a dollars and cents thing. Culturally, the US doesn't like the "dirty" trades that aren't directly union dominated, of which machining is one.
Whiiiiiich for the punks like me who want to make $$ in this business, all the better. When supply of talent dips, but people still want the goods, the price of those goods goes up. My $100/hr shop rate is consistently tracking up to $150.

And that goes across the country. Once you have a few more supply line disruptions, and people still want their machined goods, and the boomers retire (auctioning off their shops at sweet deals might I add), wholesalers will have to fork out the good cash and it ends up being an gold-rush lite for the young guys. And then us young guys are hunting for the people who currently hold the fire to learn from them.

I don't subscribe to the "it's a dying trade" thing. Maybe automation means less bodies are required, but that's a good thing. Maybe some old-school skills deserve to die, like the best horse and buggy maker getting retired by Ford. But by and large the demand for machined parts isn't going down. So long as it doesn't go down, the money will be there in some capacity.

When people smell money they tend to rush in, and the number stabilizes once again. Right now it seems like an in-between stage: I plan to make good money as a solo shop owner, and wages across the industry are pretty low.
Once more companies get into supply crunches they start to accept higher quotes, and small guys like me can afford to offer higher wages to attract smart employees, and then employees from bloated industries (tech startups?) start to fill out the demand. You can train a smart guy with no experience to be useful within 3-4 years, it's not /that/ archaic of a skill. But anyways the more archaic and hard, the more money you can charge. Win-win.

 

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

From a 23 y/o...

Pretty sure the young guys who are hungry enough to learn will figure out a way to find the guys who know the skills needed. Almost everyone is too lazy to learn, or to teach, but the people who are hungry in either category end up finding each other. It seems to be a question of just whether or not someone has "moxie".

At the end of the day, I do think it's a dollars and cents thing. Culturally, the US doesn't like the "dirty" trades that aren't directly union dominated, of which machining is one.
Whiiiiiich for the punks like me who want to make $$ in this business, all the better. When supply of talent dips, but people still want the goods, the price of those goods goes up. My $100/hr shop rate is consistently tracking up to $150.

And that goes across the country. Once you have a few more supply line disruptions, and people still want their machined goods, and the boomers retire (auctioning off their shops at sweet deals might I add), wholesalers will have to fork out the good cash and it ends up being an gold-rush lite for the young guys. And then us young guys are hunting for the people who currently hold the fire to learn from them.

I don't subscribe to the "it's a dying trade" thing. Maybe automation means less bodies are required, but that's a good thing. Maybe some old-school skills deserve to die, like the best horse and buggy maker getting retired by Ford. But by and large the demand for machined parts isn't going down. So long as it doesn't go down, the money will be there in some capacity.

When people smell money they tend to rush in, and the number stabilizes once again. Right now it seems like an in-between stage: I plan to make good money as a solo shop owner, and wages across the industry are pretty low.
Once more companies get into supply crunches they start to accept higher quotes, and small guys like me can afford to offer higher wages to attract smart employees, and then employees from bloated industries (tech startups?) start to fill out the demand. You can train a smart guy with no experience to be useful within 3-4 years, it's not /that/ archaic of a skill. But anyways the more archaic and hard, the more money you can charge. Win-win.

I used to think it worked like that as well. Meanwhile the work went away
Regards Tyrone

 

[Covenant MFG]

I used to think it worked like that as well. Meanwhile the work went away
Regards Tyrone

Lol yeah if the work does actually go away from here for good then screw it I'll follow it. Viva Mexico everyone

 

[technocrat]

Sure there are people who want to learn, but as there are less mentors, the chance of bumping into one with broad experience becomes less.
Same as machine tools, as they get sold for scrap there are less available and the entry level becomes much higher.

We have the situation in Australia now where we lost our car industry via a government decision. One of the first flow on effects was the loss of large scale fastener manufacturing. Of course this also led to a lot of small specialist supplier/manufacturers closing. The machines are all gone to china, either operational or as scrap. As far as I know, all bolts are now imported.

Knowledge is the same, easy to lose and impossible to get back. We have a responsibility to pass on what we know, but it needs to go to someone who will eventually have the same ethos to use it and pass it on as well.

 

[Covenant MFG]

My story...

Got hired on entry level (ish, I was an operator among other things at a product shop previously) at a job shop. First months were broom pushing and cleaning and maintenance, eventually shadowed for a few months, and then got put on an older (80's) Matsuura, next to a guy in his mid-late 50's, I'll call him Bill.

The guy had worked in his dad's auto body shop for a while, and eventually went into the army Rangers. Got an honorable discharge after getting shot up on an extraction operation in the middle east. He had some definite PTSD, and refused any mental help from the VA since he didn't trust their methods (probably rightfully). He was one of those guys that did everything 100% and super competitive and intelligent. Pretty short temper though which gave him a lot of trouble. He had also ran a solo shop with 4 or 5 machines previously and seems to have done pretty decently until hitting cashflow issues.

The shop we worked at basically had him as a skilled guy, and whatever apprentice was there would be on the old matsuura doing simple stuff, mostly keyways, and have Bill help out and teach where possible. Pretty good system.

I, being the stupid 19 y/o kid, did plenty to piss him off, and I learned pretty quickly that "why are you doing it this way" can VERY easily be taken as "you're doing it wrong".

At one point, I was cleaning up, and used an old shop broom that we shared, to brush some chips off the table in the machine (after the coolant had dried so I figured it was fine. It was not). Got a good 5 minute cussing out for ruining a shop broom, which I deserved.
I took the point, and next morning on the way to work I stopped by home depot and bought a new one and put it next to the old one. A day or two later he asked where it came from and I mentioned I picked it up to replace the shop one, and after that it was gravy. Not just machining techniques of which he was an excellent teacher, but how the shop dynamics worked, and why one guy was doing well or another wasn't, and how he started his shop. He was the only guy I told when I got my own machine and he helped set it up, and helped out with advice for buying tooling and what kinds of jobs do go for or avoid up until I went full time and quit there.

I heard soon after from one of the other guys that he quit (mental stuff) and went elsewhere. I tried for a while to track him down but none of the contact methods I had worked, so he may have followed through on some of his stories and decided to go live off the grid somewhere. Apparently he owned a number of gold claims up in the Placer hills.

 

[???]

I worked with a older toolmaker George who was pretty cranky. One day he called me over and said watch the guy opening a four pillar die. The guy was flogging the crap out of it with a brand new large copper hammer. He said I've been watching how you work and have noticed how you approach the job. He then said you can ask me anything but I don't help people like the guy with the big hammer.

We had a universal mill with a Indian head where someone had lost the setup tables for the head. A toolmaker asked him to calculate the compound angles, he said go work it out. About an hour later the toolmaker came back and said I've tried and just can't do it. George took the pencil and notepad and did the calculations, the toolmaker asked him to explain what he had just done. George gave him a highly confusing explanation that was really difficult to grasp. The toolmaker was as thick as two short planks and wouldn't have grasped the math anyway. In summary if you showed aptitude, determination and intelligence George would share his knowledge and if not get out a big hammer.

 

[CarbideBob]

First you'll have to find members of the next generation that really want to learn the skills you have to pass on - and the best of luck of that score (you'll need it)

How does one make them want to learn it?
Maybe push and challenge? Most certainly there are limits to that.
Most people want to go home feeling very good that they excel at what they do at work even if toady's output was scarp at QC.