Gary Shubert wrote: > I believe Mark L. discusses taking a vo-tech class to learn how to paint > his car on his web site.
My experience with the local tech school has been pretty good, but the welding experience one of them. I guess you could say I'm a dropout! The old guy that taught welding thought it was important to learn to stick weld, so for four weeks we cut steel plate for the first half hour of the "class", and then spent the rest of then night trying to weld them together. The "teacher" was always in his office watching TV, and was too busy to break away and come see how we were doing or offer any advice on how to improve our methods. I was hoping to learn to gas weld aluminum better, and I certainly didn't see much hope of learning to TIG weld there, so I quit wasting my time going. I tried some of that aluminum brazing stuff, and was fairly unimpressed, despite the fact that I've been soldering electronics with success since I was a kid. As with gas welding aluminum, it was a frustrating process for me, although it did provide some good experience for when I finally broke down and bought a TIG welder. I might could make it work better now though, knowing what I know about welding aluminum. When welding any kind of substantial aluminum piece, you're way ahead to preheat the pieces to about 450 degrees before you weld on it, otherwise you spend a lot of time pumping heat into the piece before anything really happens as far as welding goes. As for the bodywork class, it was just plain excellent. The guy that taught that class was downright evangelical about teaching us bodyworking, and it was a very good experience. I fixed a couple of little dents on it, sanded the whole car down, and repainted it. The best thing about that class was the $55,000 paint booth that was less than a year old. All we had to do was sign up for it, so I chose the last week of class to paint my 16V Scirocco. I'd already painted a few cars twenty years prior, and did a pretty good job of it, but having that paint booth was a real plus. Thanks for reminding me about the tech school though...I need to sign up for the machine tool class. There's only so much you can drag out of a book. I used my rotary table for the first time last night, drilling three holes in a new Corvair harmonic balancer to mount my rear starter pulley to. I also learned how hard it is to drill and tap stainless steel, but I managed to do it without breaking any drill bits or the tap. And today I had lunch with a machinist at the airport and was telling him about the experience...so he tells me I did it the hard way. I should have just "trigged it out" and drilled and tapped the three holes in a triangle and been done with it! Live and learn... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL website: www.n5...@hiwaay.net email: N56ML at hiwaay.net
