Member Profile

More about me:

Left school aged 15yrs. to start an apprenticeship at a local company making industrial fans. This involved spending the first year in a training school making tools and learning to use machinery and hand tools. Following the first year, a program of working in each department in the factory was undertaken. This included machine, press, duct, assembly, and winding shops, service repair. and the foundry which cast aluminium. Pressure and gravity die casting. At that time the company made its own electric motors both AC and DC.

One day per week was spent at the local technical college studying C&G machine shop engineering and mechanical ordinary national certificate (ONC)

Towards the end of my training I spent time with the service engineer visiting many installations where the company's fans had been installed (by other contractors) and for various reasons were not working satisfactorily. This involved both mechanical and electrical work.  

When my apprenticeship finished I took the post of service engineer serving the whole of the London area, and beyond!

After three years or so I decided on a job change and joined Post Office Telephones as an exchange and repeater station installation engineer. This involved more study, initially doing a correspondence course for C&G intermediate certificate in telecommunications followed by day release training to complete the final certificate and then HNC electronics.

Many PO training courses were undertaken at Bletchley Park and Stone (Yarnfield) training schools. During my 30 years with the PO and later BT the technology was continually changing. I started by extending manual exchanges (customers phones had no dials or keypads) then Strowger, Crossbar, Electronic and finally System X data management.

Gratefully accepting voluntary redundancy in 1995, I returned to the Fan Manufacturers for a couple of years. Then found a job at the local Sixth Form College as a technician in a workshop with both metal and woodworking machinery. So back to where I started making things and helping students make things.

My interest at home is repairing clocks which sometimes involves making new parts, and anything else the family presents me with that needs attention.Car repairing has also figured with both my own and my families' cars. I also make a few tools and enjoy a bit of simple computer programming using assembly language. 

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