Maker Movement / Mending Things

My wife is doing some knitting with our youngest granddaughter. The required 8mm needles were too long for easy use so she asked me if I could shorten them. After a little thought I drilled through the heads with an 8mm drill until they came off, shortened the rods and glued the heads back on. A satisfied customer 


Needles are too long



Drilling the heads 8mm



Setting the length



Parting off



Done



Best regards


Roger

That may well be one problem amongst others Alasdair, but that is certainly unacceptable to students and society as a whole. If they cannot work enough to get a "good" degree (whatever that is), then tough. In the first instance the University should not have given them a place, and secondly if the teaching is bad, and I think it is, then the University should suffer the penalty of being sued for poor teaching. I had some poor teaching, and it led to a row with the external examiner when I had my viva, but then that is just life. One just gets on and does what is needed. I don't think I ever recruited anyone who proved to be a "dud", and I did get many who were immensely capable. Amongst these were a number who had taken up amateur radio and got themselves licenses at a young age. They were the ones who did first class work from day one, because they understood what they were about. They could deal with the usual engineering challenges, that everything didn't work as expected and needed some thought to fix. They had done it before and succeeded, and that gave immense confidence. That is what we expect, a total desire to succeed. The thing which shocks me most is that 25% now seem to get 1st class Honours. It used to be a few percent. That shows that the teaching is poor and standards are way down, unless someone can show that we are that much cleverer. It is the same at all levels.

Dave,

I had a rather less intensive university course - we got Wednesday afternoon's off. Apart from that it sounds familiar.

Part of the problem also is the quality of the pupils leaving school also appears to be falling (I say appears because it is only anecdotal evidence). Certainly when I went to university as a mature student in my mid-twenties I found that my fellow students were asking fundamental questions that I knew from school, about seven years previously.

However I think the biggest problem is the expectation of many that a degree is what is necessary and if you are paying a shed-load of money then graduation is expected. Back in my day (and presumably yours) if someone couldn't cope with the course they would drop out, and with grants they did not incur any debt as a result. Nowadays they are all getting into debt and expect a degree at the end of it, and if the university fail to award degrees there is a potential for claims for compensation for poor teaching or similar. This means that the poorer quality students are still likely to get a degree.

I would like to take up an original point about the teaching of Engineering in University. From my experience it is fairly useless, as the students end up knowing nothing very useful, and an awful lot which is either wrong or very unlikely to be useful in any real work. My favourite question when interviewing potential new graduates was to ask about the details of their project. How exactly did some part work? How did they design this section (electronics) or in some cases mechanical actions or mechanisms. An interesting range of excuses for knowing nothing then usually followed, typically:

Fred did that bit

The supervisor said I should do it that way

I copied the circuit from the internet, I don't understand it fully

The current in R3 controls everything, so I chose it with a resistance box until it worked

I only wrote the software, I don't know how the hardware works

etc....

This is because learning practical skills, even how to design a circuit is very time consuming and expensive, and testing it is done correctly even more so. It is much easier to teach (actually that may not be the word for what actually happens) some course which sounds good like electron dynamics for example, when the lecturer did not even answer the question "if electric current is movement of electrons, how can electric current propagate at c, as electrons clearly cannot". You should hear the answers to that one, mainly vague hand waving, even from supposed University lecturers.

When I was at University my course had 40hours a week of contact time, homework, private study etc. and was a full time exercise 7 days a week. Half the time was spent in laboratory exercises which taught practical abilities to those who did not have them already. Now paying £9250 per year results in a few hours contact time, occasional lab sessions and loads of "free" time. That is why we now have difficulty getting "Real" engineers, who usually cannot do maths either BTW.

Having recently moved apartments it was time to get the music systems back in operation. My 40 year old Dual CS505 was deemed visually unacceptable for the living room so I had to buy a new gramophone (a what Grandad?) opting for a Denon DP-300F (which does have a black perspex cover ?).


I intended to keep my only 20 year old Sony double cassette deck but on trying it neither side would load properly  . Off to the workshop with it. After the removal of many screws and connectors I found that the drive belts were past their best.




An internet search found a replacement set for CHF12. The old and the new.




There were plastic pegs to hold the belts in place during assembly.




Then it was easy to put the belts back on their respective pulleys.




I put it all back together again (having taken pictures of where all the connectors went) and tried it. All worked just as it should ? One less item in the WEEE stream.


Best regards


Roger

Here is an old 18 volt torch with an LED lamp retrofitted :)

Thank you Mike, that makes sense. I was thinking in a completely different direction involving the gaps betwwen the coils allowing for premixing some air with the gas ?


Best regards

Roger

The springy nozzle has a low-ish  thermal mass but more usefully and is a poorer conductor than an equivalent solid tube. This reduces the length of metal gas pipe needed before you are cool enough not to melt the plastic.

You find springy handles on oven doors and steam valves from a certain era too, and  the idea is the same, running cooler.