Classic Hifi Care

Boy, I must be getting old. Do any of you remember having a mechanical drawing class in high school? Our teacher was Roy Wilson, also one of the junior varsity basketball coaches. He insisted on straight lines and you had to put an "X" on the end where a board butted up to another board. I am drawing out the bench for my shop. Mr. Wilson would not be impressed. I used to be good at mechanical drawing and enjoyed it. That's probably all done by a computer program now. I sold all my woodworking equipment at the sale, so all I have to work with is an electric drill, a hammer and a tri-square. I sorely need a good clamp, but that won't happen. They want almost $75 for a six-foot clamp.

I do, and my teachers name was Joe Abe. He was one of the best teachers in the whole school and did not take any fooling around or crap. He also was the woodworking teacher.

Bill

Me too. Mr. Sonnevil. One of my favorite teachers ever. 7th grade was mechanical drawing. 8th grade was shop. Turning something on the big old Oliver wood lathes, making an electric motor, tin work (scoops, funnels, boxes), wood projects. I have all mine. It turns out that Mr. Sonnevil had retired up here in a rural area. I put all my shop projects on a sheet in the back yard, took a photo, and sent it to him. He died about 20 years ago, but my brothers and I always remember things Mr. Sonnevil taught us. I've got my mechanical drawings with his red-pencil grades on them. It was such fun that I asked for a drawing set for Xmas. The board and T-square are sitting about 15' from where I'm typing. Four years ago I had to apply for a shoreline work permit when I reinforced my seawall at the cottage. The DNR wanted drawings. I did front, side, and plan views of the proposal. Mr. Sonnevil would have been pleased to know that the skills he taught were being put to good use.

It always seemed strange to me that some of my fellow students didn't take shop class seriously. Some were headed toward executive careers, I guess, and others didn't take anything seriously. But for me, it was great fun and involved stuff I wanted to learn--manual skills that produced useful things and that required some craft and care to make. My Dad always liked tools and manual work. It carried on. When I finally finished my formal education at the age of 28 (!!), the first evening class I signed up for was welding.

We honor people who helped us learn when we repeat their names and describe their contributions to our lives.

If I were king, we'd mandate shop classes again for everybody and all students would take civics too.

Chris Campbell

Interesting you should mention Oliver woodworking equipment. My manager at work collects, restores and uses Oliver woodworking equipment. He started his collection when the high school he attended was torn down, and all the old Oliver shop equipment was going to be scrapped. He rescued it, set it up in his workshop, and still uses it. The Oliver guy who built this equipment was a relative of the guy who started Oliver Farm Equipment company. Mr. Wilson wasn't the shop teacher. A man named Hawkins was the shop teacher. Mr. Wilson taught advanced math and mechanical drawing along with being a basketball coach. Our shop equipment in school was Ingersol.

Mechanical drawing, wood shop, and metal shop were, along with science classes, my favorite in Jr & Sr high. Mr. Dummler taught metal shop, Mr. Gross taught drawing and wood shop. My recollection is that the big tools were Delta.
I liked doing that stuff so much that using those skills, and having learned more from my Dad who built 2 of his own houses, for several summers off from teaching early in my career I did home improvement work: decks, sheds, clubrooms &c. When I retired from teaching Biology and Chemistry, I though I was done for good, but when the Carpentry teacher at the Voc-Tech unfortunately got cancer I was asked at the last minute the next September to replace him, and had 2 of my best years ever. It spoiled me with access to a great array of professional tools: 24" planer, 20" DeWalt radial bench saw, huge table saw, big band saw, 12" jointer, shaper, large stationary belt and disc sanders, most of it the best, Powrmatic and such. Still have a pretty decent woodshop, but nothing like that!

I still have things I built in wood shop and metal shop too. I use the metal tool box and hammer I built often.

Bill

Mr. Wilson would make me recite with "the dumb group" for making the little blunder I just made. I forgot to allow for the 2X6 leg sitting INSIDE the frame, so the timber I listed for cross- bracing on the material list would be 3" too long. I may rent a miter saw at HD and not worry about having them cut the small timber. I thought paying them 25 cents a cut, then just having to put it all together, was going to save time and aggravation. I'm not so sure, considering all the trouble I'm having remembering how to do it right.

These stories are fantastic!
I grew up around a machine shop my late grandfather started in '46, it was sold in 2006 but "Oliver" was one of many names of the equipment there: Gilbert Cincinnati, Bridgeport, Do-All, Dianichi, Bugmaster CNC. Of course we had a drafting table in the offices and Dad designed our 1970 house on it, my first experience seeing mechanical drawing on paper space take shape in real space.

I had mechanical drawing my last year in HS only, Mr Colvin introduced the class motorheads (me) to cross-sections of the engine in his car, a 225 Cu in Slant 6. Three years I went to the County Vo-Tech for Electronics where the teachers brought in their stuff for us to work on. The auto shop and body shop similarly got teacher's cars to work on. Our instructor Mr. Bucks' let me work on two of his TVs, a 19" Quasar hybrid and a Sanyo-made tube set branded "channel master" which I saw was same a a Sears another teacher had . Those guys were awesome, but the late 70s also had lots of jokers in class as Roger can attest.

20 years in the future, as I worked with Architects all through the 90s-2000s, I saw the changes those HS and County AVTS shops underwent. With lawsuit-fearing solicitors laying on the paranoia, many decided "shop" was less important than a fashionable no-brainer, the computer lab. VoTech was combined into many fewer options as trade jobs were less in vogue. The better-run schools (not necessarily richer) always built at least a "CAD classroom" next to the shop itself. Many combined wood and metal into "materials technology" shops with varying layouts. Others did away with much of that "filth-making" equipment because they were too wealthy a public school for that, preferring to turn out lawyers, bankers, politicians, doctors, lobbyist's, anything but a skilled artisan, just like dad - GOD forbid a common trade

The machinery I remember from childhood is grandpa's Van Norman brake drum lathe and his Sioux "indian Head" valve grinder. It would cut three-angle valve faces so he could hop up those old straight 8, flathead and the early Buick and Packard V-8 engines. Not just everybody had a valve grinder that would do three-angle valve faces as well as the valve seat, especially in a flathead engine. Three angle valve seats along with positive valve rotators guaranteed no valve problems, particularly in Buick OHV engines. Grandpa and Uncle Fort would "rough draw" a building, on the inside of a cereal box cut open, only using a pencil and a straight edge. I was always amazed that they could make any sense whatsoever of their drawings, let alone their having any hope the building they designed would stand on it's own without falling in.

I really liked mechanical drawing. We did orthographic 3 view drawings of items Mr, Craw would select for us. Ww would draw in our woodworking shop in the basement of the 80 year old school.

All you guys need to buy the book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew Crawford. I read it a few years back. Here's an excerpt from the essay that he turned into the book:

Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”
At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent.


Ain't that the truth? So many people are completely helpless when something stops working, and because they have no idea what to do or how to analyze it, they put it out on the curb (for us!!) and buy a new one. You can find the essay here and take a shortcut but the book is worth reading.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicat ... -soulcraft

Mr. Sonnevil, the shop teacher, is a common topic when I'm with my brothers. We all have such positive memories. But there's also Mr. Phillips, the kind older neighbor who let us "help" as kids in his woodshop. He was an older guy who sold "power shovels." Remember those? Bay City Shovels, it was a big deal. His wife, Mrs. Phillips, was equally kind and generous with her time, attention, and unlimited patience for kids. As it turned out, Mr. Phillips seems to have been in charge of constructing the big table for the electric train that Santa Claus brought one year. That was not immediately obvious at the time to us kids.

Chris Campbell

Every neighbor hood needs a citizen like that. I was fortunate to live in a rural area with such folks taking on dad roles to more than their own kids. Just the farmers among them were builders and mechanics by default.

Farmers have to be good mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and builders by necessity and are usually very good at it.

I read that book a few years ago, it kind of reminded me of "Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance" but lighter. I really enjoyed it and gave to our Physicist/Engineer son, who also really liked it.

Luckily both our sons got the DIY gene, I'm kind of amazed at the stuff they will tackle. Josh pulled his '84 Saab Turbo fwd engine/trans and rebuilt it, unaided except by the FSM. Bill worked summers in Marinas as a boat mechanic, including 2 yrs on big 40'+ twin diesel Sportfishermen when he was in Grad school on Long Island, after 3 summers of working on outboards and I/Os in Vermont while an undergrad college student. Now he does bio-mechanical R&D for Agilent's BioTek Division. He also got my late Uncle's big Atlas lathe and knows how to use it as he used to have to custom-build parts to maintain the accelerator at Brookhaven Labs and took classes to do it, TIG welding too. So many young people these days don't know how, or want, to fix or build things so I'm very proud of their willingness to try, usually successfully, pretty much anything they put their mind to.

Our daughter is another story, she's brilliant but spacey, she once blew up her Montero because she hadn't checked the oil for years, and is always hitting something, in VT she flattened our rural mailbox by backing over it. She'll just about call an electrician to change a light bulb. But she's the sweetest most giving person you'll ever meet.