A Little of What I do

For the past four months, I've been busy training to become an airplane mechanic (the PC term is Aviation Maintenance Technician, stupid PC). Usually all I get to do is sit in class and work on worksheets, or view powerpoints about various items. However, once in a while I also get to do some really fun, hands on things. The hands on things are generally called projects. One project I did started with these two items above. The first picture is a piece of Steel Rod Stock, and the second picture is a piece of aluminum bar stock. We cut the bar stock to size, heat treated it (heated it up to a high temp and then put it in cool water) and practiced anodizing it (anodizing is a corrosion resistant coating that turns the aluminum a gold color). My class then put the metal aside so that we could practice our drafting skills. We ended up drawing up the plansfor our individual blocks. Each of us had to follow precise instructions. My blue prints ended up looking like this:

Once I finished the blueprints, I had to manufacture the block according to the dimensions and layout on the blueprints. That included drilling holes in specific places, doing a countersink (so a countersunk screw or rivet could sit flush with the surface), counterbore one hole, thread two holes, ream two holes to a specific size, then put a helicoil in one of the holes that I already threaded. The block itself had to be within certain dimensions, so I hand filed the block until it was in those dimensions and was square. The corners also had to be rounded so that they were at a certain dimension and radius. The rod stock also had to be cut to a certain size, the head of the bolt filed so that it was square and a 5/16 wrench could fit on it. On the bottom of the rod stock, I had to cut threads in it until it fit into one of the holes I threaded on the piece of aluminum and it was flush with the end of the block when threaded. This is how the finished product looked.

As part of the finished product, we had to polish the block. I had a pretty good time making this. I used everything from jewlers files to drill presses. Most of the time we worked in the shop with a cessna 172. It was great.