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I don't think that college gives the same education that they used too. I was just given a bookshelf full of electronics and physics books from the 60's. Just opening one of those books makes a guy wonder how people learned all this stuff. They really dove deep into the hows and whys of electronics. My electronics courses that I had in college were basic. In fact I am thinking of starting my 6 year old off with my old text book and see how he does. It was really simple,"this is a diode, it looks like this.... it is basicly a one way valve" then I think there was about a half a paragraph on what made it work.

But to answer the topic question.... How do you guys know about all this.. technical stuff?

The simple answer is "The internet" When I first wanted to build a cnc machine in the late nineties. There wasn't nearly as much information as there is now. You really had to dig deep to find out what you didn't even know you needed to know. Now you can find anything you want to learn about pretty easy and there is probably a forum/usergroup to help you find more answers to stuff you didn't know you needed to know. The key here is that you have an interest in something and follow through with learning about it until something else catches your imagination. All I knew in the late nineties was that CNC machines were cool. I didn't know anything about stepper motors, servo motors, encoders motor drives or G-code. All I knew was that I could draw parts on a computer and I wanted to be able to make them(I went to school for mechanical drafting in the mid nineties, then back a few years ago for robotics) I will admit, I thought it was going to be easier than it was to build the first machine. But, I got it done and it worked, since then I have built around ten cnc machines, and have been able to put food on the table making stuff in my garage with them.

My latest interest is learning about welding. Sure, I can run mig, and I have done some tig and stick, heck I have even gas welded before. All out of neccessity. But now I want to seriously learn about it and become good at it. I am kind of leaning toward gas welding for the initial focus.

x0-000 wrote:I noticed a lot of you guys have quite a lot of technical knowledge. I don't really have the knowledge or equipment to tackle a lot of projects i'd like to try. How did you guys get it? Do you work as an engineer and learned this stuff at uni? Are you a tradesman? Do you just tackle project after project and slowly accumulate knowledge gained from books and the internet? I'm just a second year mining engineering student and I'm wondering if I'll ever be able to learn how to weld or use CAD or design a circuit or whatever.

I'm joining this conversation already in progress, so I am wondering if you learned to weld yet? I hope you have. If not, here's how I did it.

I'm a severe dyslexic, so engineering school was out for me. My father wasn't very mechanically inclined, so as a kid, I didn't even have the basic skills required to change spark plugs. (I guess the chick imprinting thing is true...) So when I joined the Army and got shipped out to south America I had to learn a lot of things fast. On the bright side, I got to see how people did things with no resources at all. (Which was good as I was broke.) And as a broke E-4, I had to fix holes in my truck exhaust and the mechanics there were glad to share what they knew. So thats how I learned I learned how to weld with coathangers and batteries. Yup, that really works, its not just on TV....

Each time I got into trouble with something I went and asked the first person that was doing what I wanted to learn. So my first bit of advice would be ask someone that is doing what you want to do. 9 times out of 10 they will be glad to share their knowledge. I bought a real live stick welder years later, and now I have a hobart wire fed unit. I bought the Hobart because I wanted to learn how to use a wire fed unit. (I had 0 experience with one.) So I gave my stick welder to a kid that was learning stick, and one of his friends that had a wire fed unit gave me the basics on operating the hobart.

I'm 49 now, and still live this way, I try to never stop learning, and I have passed that on to my kids, and have even started teaching my Grandson to weld, and use the plasma cutter. (I just got the plasma cutter, so he might end up teaching me more than I can teach him on that....) B-)

Hey Jim. That's really cool. I learn the same way. ....jump in face first knowing that I don't know what I'm doing. ....then ask people when I get stuck. ...or just screw up a bunch of times, and learn from experimentation.

An additional note that may be of use to someone. When someone teaches me something, I do exactly what they say the first time. ...as identical as I can get it. Yes, I always have loads of ideas, and questions, and things I want to try, but getting someone elses full method will fill in questions that you'd miss if you didn't take in the entire thing. Then I start asking them questions about out of the box sorts of things, and most of the time they tell me I'm rediculous, and that's when I know I've reached the end of their usefulness in that area.

jamius wrote:Hey Jim. That's really cool. I learn the same way. ....jump in face first knowing that I don't know what I'm doing. ....then ask people when I get stuck. ...or just screw up a bunch of times, and learn from experimentation.

An additional note that may be of use to someone. When someone teaches me something, I do exactly what they say the first time. ...as identical as I can get it. Yes, I always have loads of ideas, and questions, and things I want to try, but getting someone elses full method will fill in questions that you'd miss if you didn't take in the entire thing. Then I start asking them questions about out of the box sorts of things, and most of the time they tell me I'm rediculous, and that's when I know I've reached the end of their usefulness in that area.

Oddly enough, I end up being the guy thats no longer useful more often than not. B-) I do a lot of the ground work on projects, and once I help get them to a point of viability , they are handed off to people (like you) that can push it farther. I don't mind though, being at the beginning of a process is often more exciting for me than being on the finishing end. I have to admit though, its strange to see things I've helped get started take off and make someone else money. (Kinda makes me wish I hung in past the; "Look at the shiny thing" stage of the game. B-)