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Looking for a 1 Week Training Class to Improve Manual Machining Skills

cincicliff

Plastic
Joined
Sep 20, 2006
Location
Cincinnati, OH
My wife and I would like to attend a 1 week class to learn old school tricks and tips for how to use a manual vertical mill and engine lathe “the right way”. We think this would make a fun vacation and can travel to where the class is offered. I am self-taught with 20 years of occasional hobby experience and my wife is starting out.

I have found a lot of 2 – 3 hour introductory classes at Maker Spaces and Semester long classes at Trade Schools. Our local Maker Space classes were great – we just would like to learn more techniques and maybe complete some projects. Does anyone know of an accelerated 1 week or several day class / seminar for manual machining?

Thanks
Cliff
 
The NRA has summer gunsmith schools.They are all over the country.I know that they have a machinists basic and advanced. I observed one at Trinidad State Junior College in Colorado when I was there.
 
My wife and I would like to attend a 1 week class to learn old school tricks and tips for how to use a manual vertical mill and engine lathe “the right way”. We think this would make a fun vacation and can travel to where the class is offered. I am self-taught with 20 years of occasional hobby experience and my wife is starting out.

I have found a lot of 2 – 3 hour introductory classes at Maker Spaces and Semester long classes at Trade Schools. Our local Maker Space classes were great – we just would like to learn more techniques and maybe complete some projects. Does anyone know of an accelerated 1 week or several day class / seminar for manual machining?

Thanks
Cliff

.
usually when hired for a machining job you get 1 to 2 months one on one training to learn machines, job setups, where stuff is and how company expects you to do stuff.
.
many different jobs the setups and how done unless you see and do you dont learn a particular way. i have seen before where students learned stuff in a class and were ok as long as jobs exactly the same. but as soon as a different job or setup was needed they were stuck.
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many places the job setups are explained and usually have pictures so its rare to have to ask anybody questions other than what a non standard name means like use a "green tap" or use fixture position 4 what that means
.
go take night school classes usually 12 weeks and 2 or more days a week so basically only like 12 x 8 = 72 hours.
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by the way get a job and you learn and get paid. go to school and you find tuition is expensive. not easy to get jobs but it sure pays better that paying for school
 
You may want to talk to John Saunders in Zanesville OH and has you tube channel NYC CNC as he has classes inside his shop on welding and CNC programming, He calls his company Saunders Machine Works.
 
i took expensive night school classes cause i knew i would loose job in 1 to 5 years. when i actually lost job i had a choice.
.
1) take more night school classes which can be expensive
2) get a 2nd shift or job working the evening shift
.
pays better working. still learning in the school of hard knocks. after 6 years you can
1) have $300,000 saved from working a job
2) be in debt with student loans often of many $100,000's
.
you aint going to learn much in a few days. going to learn a lot more by working a few years instead. you work in a shop you can ask another for advice or opinion and he can explain reasoning. often old timer seems like has strange ideals but often its more new guy does not know the reasoning. a lot easier to ask questions one on one rather than take too long in a classroom sometimes. you can in a shop see what works and what doesnt work too well but often it takes days, weeks, months, years to learn and understand
 
I once did a one-day TIG welding course with my wife and it was awesome.

I shall be curious to see if anyone comes up with anything here other than giving the OP random career advice. We have the same problem training engineering students as they need about a week of course work and practice to get comfortable with mill and lathe and then we can show them stuff from there. There are shop courses in our engineering schools but if I get a student who hasn't had the shop course yes or goes to some old school university that isn't good at this (looking at you McGill) then I can't get them into anything. I actually hired a second year student for January in part because she had taken he program`s shop course on her on volition before it's required by the program. I agree with the OP that maker space type courses are a bit suspect. And YouTube is great but it's much better once you have some idea what you are doing as you need to have some sense of whether the person you're watching knows what they are doing, which may or may not be the case.
 
Im curious do you already have some machines since you say improve. I take it you already are trying some stuff at home. I had no experiece 2 1/2 Years ago. Just started simple and built on it.
 
Either join a local machinist club (steam engine and clockmakers are good this way) or hire a local job shop machinist to come to your place and mentor. A saturday morning teaching gig may be an interesting low stress side job for an experienced, older machinist.

Suggest look up and message Jim Hoying on this site for suggestions- he's near your location.

L7
 
Short training like that is something I would like to offer, if I could see how it would be carried out with due regard for liability if someone gets hurt, or a machine gets damaged. Sure, you can do it 'under the table' but that won't fly in the real world if there is an injury. I have difficulty imagining even a waiver that could hold up, if some insurance lawyer wanted to break it.

You COULD buy my shop, and hire me, and then when we're done, I'd buy it back....maybe :D
 
well .. it's a quibble, but 12 x 8 = 96

metalmagpie

*sigh* Must be those damned spreadsheets... again..

:(

But yes...as has been "touched on". It's the USA. Nine times more litigious than the second-place "winner".

Liability throws good intentions for any facility not already IN the "education business" into a snarl.

Even willing "risk takers" would have to know the both of you already, and know you pretty well.
 
Wow- a week isn't much. I've mentored formal apprentices, and I'm trying to imagine what I could possibly teach in a week. In the course our apprentices took, it's 4 years of night school and 8,000 hours of on-the-job training. Granted, that's mold making, but still. I once took a 40 hour course in metric metrology. A full week's training on how to measure stuff. It would be fun to teach a course like that in my home shop, but I can't imagine how I'd cover the liability issue.
 
You'd be better off taking a few nights each week at night school for a
semester.

I would agree. Our local technical college offers classes for hobbyists and those who think they might want to enter the profession. It's generally 1 night per week 4 hours long. It's enough to get the feel for whether you want to be a professional without the long term time and financial commitment.

They have dozens of different brands and styles of machines on several shop floors. I signed up several years ago at the suggestion of a local tool vendor when I was looking for a new surface grinder. The school has at least a dozen different brands and sizes of grinders. Everything from a 6"x12" totally manual machine to a 12"x36" totally automated machine. They had several rows of Bridgeport vertical mills, CNC machining centers, Horizontal mills, and just about every machine found in a normal shop.

The instructors were all journeymen machinists or tool and die makers. They all had many years of experience and were excellent teachers. At the time I took the class it cost about $300.00 for the semester. That included the cost for materials and a small amount of tooling. It was an excellent way to try out a huge number of different pieces of machinery and make comparisons for future purchases.
 
Thanks for all of the helpful input!

The Summer NRA courses at Trinidad State look really promising. 1 week long and looks like a pretty part of the country to visit! Are the general classes good for just general machining of anything or are they focused on operations needed for gunsmithing?

I am thinking about taking the Saunders CNC course down the road. I thought it might help to first improve manual machining skills before learning how to run a machining center. Can anyone share their experience with this class - should we make the investment once we are serious about CNC machining?

Lots of good advice regarding the value of investing more time for trade school or working in the trade. Of course we are just going to scratch the surface in a week long class. My wife is thinking about attending our local trade school. Our hope with the one week class is she can gain some more experience and see if she really wants to pursue this more. For me it would be fun to learn some more things during the week away from work.
 








 
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