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

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.

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.

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.

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

There has been massive grade inflation in recent years, so 25% of students getting a 1st is the new normal.


When I was a student, the fees were paid by my local education authority.  If I wanted a good degree, I had to turn up for the lectures and pay attention.


These days, students have to pay for their own tuition.  If you are paying £27000 for a degree, then you want a good one, and a lower 2nd just isn't going to cut it.  So if you turn up for a couple of lectures and can spell your name right on the exam form, you'll get an upper 2nd.  If you actually bother to study, you'll get a 1st.  Any university that didn't do that would soon find it had no students.

This thread seems to have split in two, maybe time for a new thread??

The thread is not diverging, because the things being discussed are totally connected.


I will tell a story of me:


When I was about six or seven, I was interested in anything electrical. My parents gave me a number of "Ladybird" books which were then half a crown each. Of particular interest was "Magnets, bulbs and batteries", which illustrated a number of things one could do with these items with the intention of asking the question Why? A bit later I was given old radio and TV sets to dismantle, which whilst interesting was rather confusing, particularly the large electrolytic capacitors which connected firmly to the chassis. At the next Christmas, I was given a book by Ray Bradbury, subject building a radio receiver in stages with up to four battery valves. Obviously I was hooked, and all the rest followed on, from valve amplifiers through Amateur Radio to a career in electronics covering 40 years, interspaced with some heavy electrical stuff to add a little spice to life.


The knowledge I gained at school whilst studying for the Radio Amateurs Exam (Then a 3-hour essay type paper with calculations thrown in) and subsequently at university was greatly boosted by continuously making electronic items, and mending broken ones as they were found. It is very unfortunate that electronics has become so sophisticated and tiny because making anything with useful functionality now needs at least one computer and chips and other components really cannot be assembled without a sophisticated PCB. Even my interest in Amateur Television has been dulled because a digital transmitter is miles away from a sensible home project, although is available designed by a superb team for the  BATC and is available fully assembled and tested. One can make power amplifiers and converters for various bands as more powerful items are still of a size one can see!


Many items are made so that they cannot be mended, just complete subassemblies changed. It is disappointing to an extreme degree to have a failure of some piece of kit that is immediately beyond any reasonable repair. Modern youth will never learn because many things are virtually impossible. Somehow we need to encourage the "hands-on approach" to get anyone interested in science or engineering. Schools no longer carry out many experiments in Chemistry because the "H&S says it is too dangerous". In fact almost everything is too dangerous today, schools no longer have machine tools that pupils can use, sharp chisels are banned as being weapons etc. Just how are these youngsters expected to learn anything? Put simply learning is by doing, no wonder the only girls even slightly interested only want to be computer programmers, and there are few of those.


A few years back I taught farmers sons tractor mechanics in an Agricultural College. Even they, whose livelihoods depended on their machines, were really interested in fixing them. As to why or how they actually worked, well that was much less interesting than testing a tractor on a dynamometer or driving far too fast around the yard.


This is why I write about the University course graduates. They have missed a huge chunk of education, to the detriment of everything. Technical training is now at a very low ebb, not helped by the IET pushing women into Engineering for which they are likely to be very ill-equipped. What is needed is root and branch improvement of the training process, from primary school to University.