Shopclass Thoughts

[Philjoe5]

I’ve been reading posts on this board for a few years and I’ve made this observation. Lots of folks, myself included, spent years in careers far removed from machining, engine building and engine operating principles.

Some of us have had that Aha! Moment when we construct our first engine AND IT RUNS! Others are working toward that goal. I’ve often thought that building a model engine involves hundreds, maybe thousands of problem solving situations.

If you were a cubicle dweller, like myself, and wondered how we all got to this place (HMEM), let me recommend a very good book. It’s titled “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew Crawford. It’s about how the connection between an individual and his or her work has gradually drifted away in many of the jobs that are described today as “skilled”. It also talks about how some jobs that are called “unskilled” can often require more problem finding and solving skills than they are given credit for.

Just one old timer getting some real perspective on events that took place in my life 40+ years ago.


Cheers,
Phil

 

[black85vette]

Went out and read the synopsis and it sounds pretty interesting. Also looked at other similar titles and found "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett. It has a similar ring to it. The subject is something I have pondered having watched my past profession in electronics troubleshooting degrade into a parts swapping go/no go test. The aspect of problem solving is something I appreciate in this hobby. I am often wondering about how to do something or thinking of a way to do it with what I have on hand.

I just checked and it is in stock about a mile from here. Thanks for the post.

Edit: Just ran over and picked them both up.

 

[black85vette]

Started on the first book. Looks like it is going to be a fun read. Interesting but not too deep. The guy is a pretty good writer.

 

[Philjoe5]

I think you'll find reference to what you experienced in your field of going from troubleshooting to parts swaping in Crawford's book. The guy is a philosopher and tells some pretty interesting stories, many of which I and other members of this forum can identify with.

BTW I'm making good progress on my lathe spider - thanks again to you and others for that post.

Cheers,
Phil

 

[black85vette]

Yes it is a different world now. Don't think that we can go back but I enjoyed the days in the military when I learned about every circuit, what it did and how it worked so that if any component failed I could find and replace it. Now with mass production and high density integrated circuits the cost of the assembly is a fraction of the cost of a tech's time to troubleshoot.

 

[Lew Hartswick]

I can give you an even better example. I went from designing electronic circuits with
vacuum tubes through transistors, integrated circuits (DTL, TTL, MOS,) and into
large scale integrated, and when it got to doing everything with a micro-computer
I retired. It just wasent circuit design any longer. Now I enjoy playing with
mills and lathes.
...lew...

 

[black85vette]

It just wasent circuit design any longer. ...lew...

Ahh yes! The good old days. I was trained to take all the measurements on a vacuum tube and figure out if the tube or components attached to it were bad. I remember all those technologies and spent a lot of time on a breadboard making ands, ors, nands, nors, counters and JK flip flops (no they aren't footware) do what I wanted.

One of my friends worked for Seagate as an EE and he kept going past the microprocessor stage. It got to the point that the controls were are developed in software rather than in hardware and the engineer became a programmer or lost his job to one. (hear that Zee?? ;D)

BTW; you do know that EE is at the very center of being a gEEk, right?

 

[Kermit]

And I thought those weeks in Micro miniature repair school were going to benefit me in the work a day world.... Find the problem on the circuit board and repair it, ideally so that it is not visible as a repair. Long hours spent looking through stereo microscopes and teasing copper foil into place with giant pointy metal instruments. NEVER used any of those skills after leaving that school. We went to card swap and return to a central depot for repair. I suppose had we not been able to send cards off for repair, having someone on board who could repair them was a good idea. But :-[ , a guy wants to use a new skill once he's shown he's mastered it. Back to model building I suppose. ;D All the electronics I have learned now serves me well enough to keep us in a house with food and heating and cooling with enough left over for our hobbies and a vacation every now and again. Beats hunting and gathering for a lifetime :big:

Kermit

 

[zeeprogrammer]

Yeah...what everyone said (even black85vette) ;D. I came out of college as a gEEk. I had concentrated on embedded systems (microprocessors), both hardware and software. I knew I wanted to do this as a home hobby but it wasn't long before I could see that the level of integration and specialized tools was going to make that nearly impossible. That's what pushed me over to software only. Well nearly - you can have a lot of fun with evaluation boards.

 

[black85vette]

Enjoying the book so far. He talks about the satisfaction of the craftsman being able to see tangible results from his efforts. He also relates this to other trades. The author worked as an electrician for a time and talked about the skill of making all the conduit flow into a single row on a box and the craftsmanship involved in that or the satisfaction in taking a broken motorcycle and seeing it run well as it drives away.

It is something I had thought about for years. I had an "Aha" moment a long time ago when I went to Sea World and was watching a dog show waiting for the dolphins to perform. The trainer was asked what reward he gave the dogs to get them to chase balls and frisbees and he said "none". He explained that the chasing of the ball and frisbee is what the dog enjoyed and it was a "reward" in and of itself. It occurred to me that was why I was good at electronic troubleshooting and enjoyed it. It had its own reward system as part of the work. Each time I fixed a broken device I got the feedback that I knew how to do my job and had done it properly because the thing was working again. So every day was filled with a string of "atta boys". So I felt validated for my efforts.

I think there is a lot of that in our hobby. Whether it is the problem solving of how to make something, the skill in doing so, the craftsmanship of how well it is done or simply the thing actually runs. We get a validation that our efforts were worth doing. In some fields of engineering this is a closed loop system and contains regenerative feedback. A portion of doing the work powers doing it again.

The author also laments the cubicle world where work is disconnected from the end product and no matter how much effort you put in you never get the sense of satisfaction a craftsman or trades person gets from their work.

 

[mklotz]

The author also laments the cubicle world where work is disconnected from the end product and no matter how much effort you put in you never get the sense of satisfaction a craftsman or trades person gets from their work.

Another part of "the cubicle world" is the chance of working hard and long on a project that eventually gets arbitrarily cancelled so one never sees the fruition of one's design efforts. This is particularly true in the defense industry where much funding is at the whim of congress people with IQs less than their shoe sizes.

OTOH, cancelling some design efforts can be a blessing. I was asked to look into designing a navigation scheme for the "hopping rock" project. This was during the Vietnam conflict and some means of surveilling the trails the VC used to bring armaments south was needed. Some genius, no doubt in a drugged stupor, came up with the idea of the hopping rock.

Picture a mechanism with a vertical tube attached to a horizontal, rotatable table. Inside this tube is an extendable periscope and camera unit that can be used to look around for sneaky VC and radio photos back to whoever looks at photos like that. The whole assembly is concealed in a fiberglas cover artfully shaped and colored to look like a rock. The idea was to airdrop these into areas thought to be active and have them look for troop and materiel movement.

Only problem is the VC kept altering the trails they used so a stationary rock wouldn't be too useful. So a bar was attached to the vertical tube at an angle of 45 degrees. A sliding weight on this bar could be drawn down via a small motor to compress a spring, whereupon the weight latched into cocked position. Now the operator could point the periscope in the direction he wished to move and pop the latch. The weight would fly up the rod, propelled by the spring, to hit a plate at the end of the rod. The resulting impulse would cause the entire "rock" to hop about two feet in the direction the periscope pointed.

After I'd read the specification and my hysterical laughter had died away, I was asked what I thought of the effectiveness of this advertised-as-covert, galumphing surveillance device.

I told them that I thought it was, for surveillance, a dead loser on so many fronts that I didn't' have time to count them. However, it did have real potential as a psychological warfare device. Imagine this poor VC soldier. He's been living in the jungle for weeks on little more than fish heads and a few handfuls of rice. He finally reaches the trail and sits on a rock to have a rest. Then the rock gooses him and begins to hop away. I figure he's useless for combat for several months thereafter - maybe more if the periscope is made very sharp and pointy.

 

[shred]

As a cubicle dweller, I enjoy making parts from metal and assembling them into little engines. There's a lot of satisfaction in making something from nothing start to finish.

But, I also like seeing a piece of technology I've worked on end up in a product (along with a lot of other people's work) that shipped to maybe ten million people last year...

 

[ChooChooMike]

It’s titled “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew Crawford. It’s about how the connection between an individual and his or her work has gradually drifted away in many of the jobs that are described today as “skilled”. It also talks about how some jobs that are called “unskilled” can often require more problem finding and solving skills than they are given credit for.

I finished reading that book a few months ago.

My $1.00 short $0.98. I was underwhelmed. It was a long struggle to actually finish the book. I have since sold it on Amazon. I first read a 2-page synopsis that was in the weekly magazine The Week which made the book sound rather interesting, hence my buying and struggling through it after a few chapters.

If you remove all author's philosophical ramblings, the whole book could be condensed to a few chapters. IIRC, the guy's degree(s) was in philosophy and he worked for a think-tank early in his career. All the esoteric concepts and ethereal thoughts often times just went on and on and on. If you read the credits and footnotes, he quotes all these philosophers from A-ristotle thru many letters of the alphabet. He belabors points that could be summed up in a paragraph or 2, not multiple chapters. I often had to reread a page many times to figure out what he was trying to convey and promptly forgot it when I turned to the next page.

When his writing does come out of the clouds, he has some very good points about job satisfaction, working with your hands and brain together solving probolems and the results when all that comes together - for us in the case of a running engine.

Mike

 

[black85vette]

Well I finished the book and got less interested as I went. The first and last parts were interesting. The middle had long narratives that did not seem to have a point worthy of the amount of space they took up. The biggest hangup was the authors background. He is an accademic type with a PhD and writes in a style to impress other accademics. Puzzling since it is not a scholarly work. Not sure he knows who his intended audience is. What I would like is a brief review of the Reader's Digest version of the book. :big:

Oh well. I also got Richard Sennett's book "The Craftsman". Maybe it will be better.

 

[applescotty]

Like most of you, I was rather disappointed in the book. No more to add there.

However, for those of you that haven't read the book, I'd think it's worth the time to read this NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1

It's basically all the good parts of the book.

Scott

 

[black85vette]

It's basically all the good parts of the book. Scott

Thanks for the link Scott. He doesn't cover all the same points but hits most of them and tones down his language a bit (for the NY Times readers maybe??). Anyway it is a nice short synopsis of book and the price is much better.

 

[black85vette]

Interesting chain of events. I sent out the essay to my coworkers and my boss just brought me a copy of "Eagletter" the newsletter for Eagle Scouts. In it is an interview with Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs". He talks about his efforts to promote skilled trades as good career paths. He mentions his website:

www.mikeroweworks.com

Go check it out.

 

[ChooChooMike]

Well I finished the book and got less interested as I went. The first and last parts were interesting. The middle had long narratives that did not seem to have a point worthy of the amount of space they took up. The biggest hangup was the authors background. He is an accademic type with a PhD and writes in a style to impress other accademics. Puzzling since it is not a scholarly work. Not sure he knows who his intended audience is. What I would like is a brief review of the Reader's Digest version of the book.

Echoing my sentiments - totally agree. Other reviewers have characterized his book as his PhD dissertation. It's style is definitely aimed at academics. Kind of ironic now that he's a motorcycle mechanic in his current career Was this the next version of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair" ?? :big:

Oh well. I also got Richard Sennett's book "The Craftsman". Maybe it will be better.

I ran across some references to that, so will have to check it out.

Mike