Apprentice Piece - Turning

If the aim of the induction, as stated in the original post, was 'only required to teach safe practice, and normal operation' then i don't expect they would need to do a great variety of operations. It should probably focus on setting up, safety in use, and purpose of the different components. Speeds & feeds, behaviour of different materials, thread cutting and other more advanced operations would not be expected. I remember my first tentative use of a lathe, and was more than chuffed not to break anything, including myself, when turning a simple shouldered pin for a pivot joint in something i was making. That alone took nearly an hour. I think the best you could expect someone to make is something like the plumb bob already suggested. It could double as a paperweight, a punch, or maybe even a conker .

Anything more complex would not only take much longer to make but would also take much longer to describe and instruct.

well, first off I apologise if I got the wrong idea, but your first two posts made it sound like some sort of official government sponsored employment training scheme, with all the H and S requirements that go with it. I've had a bit to do with such courses and they are a nightmare of bureaucracy and hoop jumping. By way of an apology I offer the following suggestion for you to take up or reject as you wish -

If they are also going to do some milling maybe a little screw jack might be a bit more useful, as it includes some thread cutting - it is very useful to know how to use taps and dies with the lathe to keep everything square. I would choose aluminium for beginners as it is fairly easy to get a good finish and maybe a bit easier on the tools, but mild steel would do just as well.

steel

My take on this is that the student should be shown how to stop and start the Lathe. Then how the chuck operates.

Then given a piece of half inch MS and allowed to face of the end safely near the chuck face. then, drill a center hole and project it from the chuck to a center in the tail stock. From there go on to turn the shank to a diameter, once it is done, turn the piece end for end and then face off and center that end and set up and turn the remainder to diameter.

Apart from some detail about cutting tools and setting to center height this would give basic introduction to lather work, dont ask me what to do with the finished bar?

There is a need for people who can "drive" machines Neil. Not so much as there was but it's still about. One thing that is noticeable when seen, TV and odd places I have been in is that it tends to be done by what might be called older people. No youngsters.

Personally I think craft skills such as metal work and wood work are good for people. A challenge the majority can meet. Art isn't so simple. The disturbing aspect about society especially in the UK is the willingness to concentrate on the why nots rather than the why's.

The main reason it has "gone" is profit, the so called bottom line. It can currently be done cheaper elsewhere. I'm mentioned before that a USA arm of a company I worked for decided to have a tool made in China as it was cheaper. Complex pressure casting tooling. Taking all costs into account it represented a saving of less than 10%. In terms of the total cost of the project a drop in the ocean but more on the bottom line.

I've mentioned that before maybe elsewhere and people don't believe it. However I have seen the figures. The bottom line rules all these days. Go back in time and GKN moved out of the UK for minimal savings on the nuts and bolts they make even at the million off level. Very marginal savings but they still did it.

John

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I think I would drop boring out of the initial induction training. You simply will not get that far in the allotted one or two hours and it is a fiddly, more intermediate level skill. Centre drilling and drilling should do for a beginner orientation session. Same with parting being too advanced and too time consuming for initial session. No need to instill terror in the first session.

I would stick with plain turning, facing, different diameters, turning up to a shoulder, centre drilling and drilling as exercises on bits of disposable round bar.

Then if you want them to make a memento keepsake, give them a pre-cut to length piece of hex bar and have them make a basic centre punch. Turn one end of it round for a length of about half and inch and face the end. Then turn hex bar around and on the other end, turn the long taper by setting topslide to pre-determined angle, get fine finish cut on there, emery paper finish, then reset top slide and put put the 90 degree angle on the end.

Something like that might be doable, just, in two hours.

Safe practice is safe practice and works with or without guards, idiots are idiots and will stick parts of themselves into moving work whatever you try to put in their way.

Plastic is an excellent idea for an introduction, my first project at school was a screwdriver, we had to make the plastic handle first. 

 - Nick

Edited By Nick Hulme on 14/10/2016 12:31:22

With you all the way there until the emery paper finish

It's not something you really want anyone new to machine tools to do and some would argue it should be totally off limits regardless of experience.

It's that long ago I can't really recall what my very first piece of lathework was and neither the make of machine we had at school. I know the O level metalwork was a folded sheet steel scribing gauge and had knurling, grooving and tapping on an adjusting nut, maybe in aluminium.

In the back of the book "Screwcutting by Dr Marcus Bowmam " from Camden books is a spinning top design (a picture of it is on the cover) which you could adapt to be as complicated or as simple as you like, it uses a ball bearing as the spinning point has lots of screwcutting and knurling but it could be simplified to something you could make in 2 hours

Edited By Stephen Benson on 14/10/2016 14:48:24

I won't argue that these are good generic skills, but these days most machine shop equipment is so application/company specific that the big companies would rather do all the training in-house for their own apprentices rather than get a supply from a tech school.Perhaps it has always been like that for the big companies, but these days there aren't enough smaller jobbing engineers shops with openings for general machinists to justify the investment by colleges. They can always find students jobs for hair & beauty, horse husbandry and plastering, so that's what gets taught.

That said, I know Polly Engineering have a bright young chap who is doing very well as an apprentice with them (MEW 232 and he was at MEX) and I'm sure there are many others at small firms across the UK.

Neil

Not entirely correct Neil. Most offer courses like this

**LINK**

Also this

**LINK**

However in many cases no o levels did mean no job in many toolroom type areas in larger companies and they might still put people through the last link just to make sure. It might mean a job as a setter.

True tooling can be made on a cnc machine but as far as I am aware it often isn't.

John

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My apprentice piece, made longer ago than I care to remember, used all the operations one can perform on a lathe, plus filing and case hardening, This probably took 2 weeks rather than 2 hours.

Courses exist, but this is the proportion of students taking different types of BTECs::

Plus the non-completion rate has risen to over 40%, the highest for any group of subjects.

Engineering training isn't dying, but it looks poorly with only about 1% of vocational students completing a course each year.

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 15/10/2016 10:55:22

Neil,

Perhaps the 'non-completers' have been visiting this forum; and have seen that 'real engineers' don't bother with studies ... they just get in the workshop with a big angle-grinder

MichaelG.

Anthony, snap, I could go out to my workshop and get a tap wrench virtually identical to yours, made when I was a Boy Entrant in the RNZAF in 1964, it's much used, think it took about 4 hrs to make.

Ian S C

. . . . and a decent tape measure

Interesting that only 1.8% go into construction yet one can easily make a reasonable wage as a (ie)quantity surveyor - if one took that path-as one can with most of the other jobs. I know students who have done sports studies who are now doing something totally different having sussed how useless it has been & realised that they now have no training for anything useful. Yet we still run these courses

Edited By Sam Longley 1 on 16/10/2016 08:33:52

I would like to make a point here, we had young people come to ask for work having seen the advert. OK, sit down and ask questions, what degree did you get, 'Art', 'Oh', 'why are you applying for a job that requires you to write software to interface with competitors electronic instruments'. I thought I would learn on the job', Sorry! Bye.

Lad comes in and has BTech E, age about 25 or 30, takes one look at an electronic Theodolite in pieces and leaves. We had an apprentice for 3 years, passed his exams with one day a week at Tech. at the end of the 3 years he leaves and works on Southern rail as a Signal tech, his dad got him the job! He could name any footballer, or club and any highlights of football but had a complete lack of interface between hand and brain. I worry about travelling on those trains.

Clive

Since the training isn't paid for upfront, it's paid for in stages rather than in one go, as most people would rather. But the trouble is the training isn't garaunteed if the apprentice loses their job or gets taken off for whatever reason, most of the time this isn't the doing of the student but rather the company either goes bust or hits financial difficulty and a series of budget constraints are imposed.

So if you're placed in an apprenticeship for 4 or 5 years, the likelihood of that event happening goes from improbable to somewhat. Obviously this risk is only markedly reduced in the far larger firms, but as we know most people are working for a small business. 

So this would go down in the statistics as having being recorded "dropped out" as they rarely ask or seek the reason why you're leaving, so it sounds like they did it because they either misbehaved or of their own choice, but like i just said, it's because they don't have any choice some of the time. 

Michael W

Edited By Michael Walters on 16/10/2016 11:01:06

What is engineering if it isn't the application of science? IMHO that makes the above look promising. I would have expected useless things like "media studies" to be top.

Russell.

Are you sure appreticeships are that long these days? ( I am talking craft level)

I thought the introduction of modules also reduced the length of training required

It also meant that training could be restricted to the work that companies needed, rather than parts that they did not. That meant that trainees , whilst having a narrower range of skills, would still be able to undertake the skills a particular firm required. The modules could always be added to later.

Edited By Sam Longley 1 on 16/10/2016 13:37:13