K
Knobhead
If you want variety in your working day you’ll not get better than maintenance work. I’d frequently go in to work with my day planned out, or so I thought. Something goes wrong and that takes president over anything else.
Fault finding puts you in the hot seat, down time costs money. Don’t just think it will be electrical either, most faults will be due to other influences. Every fault is “electrical” until you prove otherwise, then it’s time to get your hands dirty. You may have a fitter with you but you don’t walk away, you both muck in together to get the plant running and product going out of the door.
Hydraulics, pneumatics, general fitting, you name it, you’ll end up doing it. I know NetBlindPaul’s apprenticeship started like mine, in the machine shop, so you had a good grounding in engineering. You need it to see why something isn’t working. Then you fix it.
My 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] day at the foundry I had to repair a drive shaft. Welded up the damaged key way, turned it back to size and then re-cut the keyway on the miller. The fitter didn’t know how to do it.
I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything.
Forgot to add, you need to learn the process while you’re doing nothing else. Unless you know what’s supposed to be happening how do you know what’s going wrong?
That turned in to a double edged sword, I found myself as shift production manager.
Fault finding puts you in the hot seat, down time costs money. Don’t just think it will be electrical either, most faults will be due to other influences. Every fault is “electrical” until you prove otherwise, then it’s time to get your hands dirty. You may have a fitter with you but you don’t walk away, you both muck in together to get the plant running and product going out of the door.
Hydraulics, pneumatics, general fitting, you name it, you’ll end up doing it. I know NetBlindPaul’s apprenticeship started like mine, in the machine shop, so you had a good grounding in engineering. You need it to see why something isn’t working. Then you fix it.
My 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] day at the foundry I had to repair a drive shaft. Welded up the damaged key way, turned it back to size and then re-cut the keyway on the miller. The fitter didn’t know how to do it.
I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything.
Forgot to add, you need to learn the process while you’re doing nothing else. Unless you know what’s supposed to be happening how do you know what’s going wrong?
That turned in to a double edged sword, I found myself as shift production manager.
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