My HS had full blown machine shops, foundry, wood shops, technical drawing, etc., but no auto shop. We worked with some pretty dangerous stuff and discipline was pretty tight. No matter how many warnings, though, there was always someone who forgot to remove the chuck key (you machinists sure know what I mean). When I was in college, a friend and I enrolled in evening adult education classes for Auto Body Repair at the local Vo-Tech HS. While the teacher focused on teaching newbies the basics (and keeping them from killing themselves), he let the two of us have the run of a fully equipped auto shop plus all the materials you could use for two nights/week for $50/semester (in 1981 dollars). I signed up three times.
Yes it was ! When a old timer with missing fingers tells me "Don't do this "He has my full attention!No one knew HOW he lost his fingers just that he did, Could have been caused a thousand different ways and nothing to do with him not knowing what he was doing!Even being a safety Nazi it was easy to get hurt back in the day,I have family members with injuries caused by machine malfunctions that were common before the early 70s and OSHA.Ever see an old punch press drop on its own because a dog didn't engage right?
I've told the story here before but I used a wrench just like this to get even with the head mechanic at the Pontiac dealership I worked at back around 74 when we were supposed to be changing over to the metric system. Did you know that the US voted to adopt the Metric system back in the early 1800s but never has completely converted?
I taught metal shop but two of my best students were into cars. The shop had an overhead door so I used to let them work on their cars too. One night after school I let my two "car" students "pull" the engine of their '70 Pontaic. It was getting late and at 1:30 am the police showed up and asked what we were doing. The neighbor had called the police. I explained that I was a teacher at the school. Lucky for me they were nice enough not to call the Principal. The year was 1972.
I took auto shop at Arlington High School in Riverside,Ca in the early 80's with Mr.Caballero.He had a cool 59 Impala with Scallops.I remember my first week in his class one of the students fell a sleep in clas. He grabbed the 2x4 he kept next to his desk and gave us the sign to keep quiet as he approached the sleeping students desk.For a big man he was quiet & light on his feet.He wound up with the 2x4 and slammed it against the desk and the student jumped and fell out his desk and probably shit in his pants.We laughed and nobody ever fell asleep in his class the rest of the semester.I did learn about brakes and carbs.
Two kids in my high school shop class were standing under a lift removing the C6 transmission from our '73 LTD shop car. The kid holding the tailshaft didn't drop his end as fast as the other guy, which made the converter slip down the input shaft and smash him right in the mouth. We thought his teeth were pretty messed up, but he took a look in the mirror and said nah, they were normal! My shop teacher was David Sheppard in DeSoto, and he was a great guy. He taught me a lot.
Once in shop class when we were building tool boxes my shop teacher looked at my piece of sheet metal that might have been a little rusted and said "I've heard eating your girlfriend out but thats rediculous"
I took 3 years of Auto Mechanics. 3rd year was 20 students with previous years of experience. I did alot of brake jobs for the guys as well as valve jobs. After I graduated from HS, I went to see if he would do a valve job for me.... He said "Help Yourself!" So while he was teaching class, I was grinding valves. He was serious, but knew who he could trust. Enjoyed reading everyone else's experiences! As someone else mentioned, they can't do things now as we did back in the 60's and early 70's. Thanks for all the great stories guys!!
I graduated from high school in 1967, and had two great teachers, the auto shop, and metals shop. The auto shop teacher had a 47 Ford Coupe with a 371 Olds, and Hydro trans. He and a friend of his who worked in a local body shop took 2 Plymouth Beleveders, one wrecked in the front, the other in the rear, spliced the two together, and ran them in NHRA drags for several years. The 413 wedge engine took them to several class records. The metal shop teacher worked in a local metal fab shop during summer breaks. After graduating I applied for a welding job there, and he told the owner to put me in the office making shop blue prints. I woked for them untill I went into the Army in 1969. After duing my duty for Uncle I did work as a welder for several years, and then as an ASE Master Auto Tech for about 25 years. Thanks to both of these teachers
I don't recall too much of my H.S. Auto shop. Our project was to rebuild a lawnmower motor, but I did learn something like grinding valves and honing cylinders. One day, the teacher said that "we will be disassembling a car". He took the class out to the slab between the Auto Shop and the H.S. building. There laid a VW Bug. Then out came a sludge hammer and he said, "put on these goggles and each of you can take a whack at it". I think we had it down to the floor in less than a half hour. After we were done, all that was left was the floor standing on 4 wheels just sitting there alone on the slab.
I had Mr. Damron in HS wood shop and drafting my Jr. and Sr. years. He had the obligatory 9 fingers but he was cool as could be. I had been tinkering around in my dad's garage for many years at that point and while other guys were making birdhouses, I build a desk. I gave it to him when I was finished with it and it was the first time he was speechless since I had known him. He had that desk for as long as I can remember and when he retired he took it home with him. He died a few years ago and went to see his widow at the funeral. She said that he talked about me to every class he had after mine. That old guy taught me a lot but the most important thing he taught me was to let people know how much they mean to you. My dad was the welding instructor at the Vo-tech school I attended my Sr. year too. I took auto mechanics because he taught me how to weld at home. Mr. Mullins was my mech. teacher. He had false teeth and never used any denture adhesive. After each third or fourth word he had to suck his teeth back into place. It was hilarious and he knew it. He would do the Hannible Lecter line from Silence of the Lambs for us and we would all crack up. He pranked all the "know-it-alls" with gopher jokes all the time. "Go get me a set of sky hooks" or Go call the parts store and ask for a radiator for a 69 volkwagen beetle. The funniest one was when he told a guy in class to shake the can of spray paint until it stopped rattling. He shook that thing for 4 hours. LOL.
I had told my students that it was a bad idea to wear watches or jewelry while working in the shop as it had a tendency to com in contact with electricity. Sure enough a few weeks later we had a car the guys were working on in the advanced class that the timing wasn't quite right on. I reached across the distributor to get hold of the vacuum advance and a big blue spark jumped about an inch and a half and nailed my watch band. They got a good laugh and about three of them told me in unison that I had told them not to wear a watch in the shop because of that. We did have a lot of fun when we were in the tune up section every year. We had a 289 Ford in a Test stand that we would pull the wires out of the cap, knock the points out of adjustment, pull the distributor and hit the starter and spin the engine over. A team of two had to pull number 1 plug, bring the engine up on compression, drop the distributor in and lock it down, set the points and put the cap and rotor on, put the wires back on in order and fire it up. The average time was between a minute and a half and two minutes with a couple of teams doing it in under a minute. It was fun and games at the time but they gained an ability that they can use the rest of their lives.
Smokeybear, I think it's great that you gave your desk to your shop teacher and he never forgot it. Goes to show that the good that you do, does live on in a meaningful way. Well done.
My metal shop teacher was very fussy about our welding booths , never leave slag or dingle berries on the table tops. He had a big slag scraper made from a piece of 1 1/2" rebar that had been forged and flattened ,then sharpened. Great tool ! If that didn't clean the tops then he'd let go of a huge ass angle grinder to make a couple passes over the top to polish it. One day " Little Johnny" which every class in every school forever, has. Johnny was named Roger and decided to weld the scraper to welding table top with some 3/16" jet rod and proceded to etch his name into the steel table, got caught on the "G" as the letters were about 4" tall. Told that he would have to stay after school to clean up his mess, dumb ass Roger/Johnny asked to use the grinder. No way, hammer and cold chistle, day in, day out,after school beating the weld off that table top followed by a mill bastard ! Took 'ol Roger about two weeks, and you know? Johnnys being Johnnys I know he did something smart ass again---but not in metalshop!!!
My junior year in high school I took metal shop. The teacher talked to the students like we were all the dumbest bastards on the planet. We could tell he would have rather been anywhere but in the class room, but needed the money so he was putting up with us. The first week he passed out 1" micrometers to all of us, along with an instruction sheet on how to read a mic. He told us to study the sheet, and when we thought we understood it, to come up to his desk and he would test us. The other guys looked at the sheet, and were lost. As soon as he sat down to read his morning paper, I walked up to the desk and asked what the test was. He said "well smart ass, you think you got it figured out?" I said, yup, what's the test?" He reached in his drawer and pulled out 6 diferent diameter slugs from about 1/4" to 1" diameter. He tossed them on the desk and said "tell me what diameter each one of these is." I put the mic on each one, checked them and told him the measurements. He looked like a deer in the headlights. "How the hell did you get that so quick"? I told him I'd been in dad's machine shop since I was 10, and reading a mic was the first thing dad taught me. He didn't say a word to me. He looked out at the class and said, "Lowe is the shop foreman, you guys need help, ask him". So, the whole semester that bastard sat at his desk reading his paper and drinking coffee while I had to babysit his class. I couldn't get any of my projects finished for taking all my time helping the dummies. I didn't get shit done, but at least he gave me an "A".
Dean, Glad you got you "A" but that teacher was or still is an insult to all teachers who actually do their job and also to all students.
I taught HS auto shop for 8 years, and it has to be the most rewarding job I've ever had. So many students came into the Intro class having NO interest in cars. Most of them left the Advanced class as total gearheads... We always had something going on in the shop that was LOUD. One time a local bus company donated an 8V71 Detroit on a wheeled cradle. One day I decided it would be fun to fire it up, so I dropped a fuel line in a 5gal can of diesel, hooked 2 batteries to it and cranked it up. The whole class was standing around it when it lit, and immediately started rolling across the shop floor! Someone yanked the cables off the starter and I was desperately trying to get the fuel cut closed as it ran into the wall. Luckily all the students made it out of the way. I finally got the air flap tripped and it shuddered to a halt. That story went all around the school. Next registration, they were turning students away... A couple years later, a tech school recruiter came to speak to the advanced class. On that day, we had my 71 Charger, a 40 Ford coupe (another teacher's), our schools 75 Nova stock car, a 70 Nova, a 56 Chevy, a 72 Plymouth Satellite, and a 51 Ford pickup (all students) in the shop. I'll never forget the guy saying "What the hell kind of shop is this? I've been doing this 18 years and I've never seen an auto shop like this!" Made me feel pretty good... I'm still teaching, but most of the students I get now have some (or a lot) of experience. Not the same as those who were seeing it all for the first time...
Re: Snaptwo: I venture to say that in most cases now-a days, if a teacher made Johnny do that kind of punishment, Johnny would run home, tell his parents and they would be meeting with the Principal saying the "the teacher is wrong"; I'm going to sue; and "my kid says he didn't do the welding on the bench top" ; "My son doesn't lie and "I want that teacher fired." The teacher would immediately be put on the defensive and unless there was a video tape showing Johnny doing the welding, the teacher would be "in the wrong."
Yes Fordy, things certainly changed during my 30 years. And its shocking to see it happen. Never being a person to sit back and do or say nothing, I voiced my displeasure often. From that, I formulated my simple understanding of our life . . " never underestimate the power of dumb people in large numbers".
When I went to welding school, we had two very cool shop instructors who would let us get away with our little "prank." My favorite was during ox/acetylene class. We all sat next to each other on metal stools (see where this is going?) When a guy was really concentrating on making a nice weld, it was pretty easy to slide you torch over there and heat up the bottom of his metal stool. It always made for a big laugh and lots of cussing. The teachers let us get away with it for a while. Tom
We had a great shop at my HS. We worked on everything from lawnmower engines to the new V6 135 Evinrudes (clam boat got sunk during a storm), car engines. We also had the array of test engines to work on. Of course someone always had a real POS they wanted to work on. One guy had a '58 or so Mopar, put it up on the lift to work on it, only to find the interior was going up but the car wasn't moving. The unibody was completely rotted away. He was wisely advised to junk it. A buddy of mine decides to change the valve cover gasket on his '61 Plymouth slant-6. This car was given to him by his dad... and it never had an oil change in 10 years. We got the valve cover off and the valve train was totally obscured in sludge. My buddy was well-advised to get a refund on the gasket and just slap it back together. Bob
My first day of teaching on the vehicle restoration course at college I was asked to demonstrate knocking out a dent from a doorskin of an old car, I was overzealous in putting the dent in - don't think the demo was supposed to take up most of the two hour class. Pretty embarrassing but lesson learned! David
I have been an adjunct auto shop instructor off and on for years and had some funny (and not so funny) things happen. One story I always told my students in the auto intro class was how one of my (not so bright) friends in high school exploded a car battery. A group guys used to share rides from school to the tech center and one day the car wouldn't start. So they pop the hood, one guy is going to the trunk to get the jumper cables the other (dumb) one gets under the hood and pulls the caps off the battery to look for water. He couln't see down the holes so he pulls out his lighter to see in the hole better. You can guess what happened next. The guy with the lighter lost an eye and the other two guys had burns and had to wear eye patches for a week. When I went to trade school we used to get new cars donated from GM and sometimes the factory undercoat is real slick. One day a group of students were working with a new car on a new hoist (that had rubber pads on the arms) and forgot to set the hoist arm locks. They put the car up, the rubber slipped on the undercoat and the car ended up on its side between the post of the hoist. Thankfully no one was hurt. The next day all the rubber pads had been removed.
High school senior year we got a new teacher Mr. Rupnow. This guy was a real fruitloop and claimed he invented the ray-o-vac floating flashlight in the 60's but only got paid $2.00 for the idea since he worked for the company. He drove a Fiero. The first day of class, my buddy and I decided to switch names - he was I and I was him. We ended up going through the entire semester this way. None of our fellow classmates told him the truth at any point. My buddy was pissed when i got a better grade and attendance record in shop class he did! We finally came clean one day next semester and he just laughed it off. after that semester his contract was not renewed.
True story.. my Sophomore year in high school. First day of power mechanics. The instructor starts writing the old WWII formula for calculating cubic inches from bore and stroke. It was an archaic string of calculations that took five minutes to write out. I throw up my hand and say.... i have a much simpler calculation (you hambers at home check me on this) Bore X bore x stroke X .7854 X the number of cylinders. He calls me a smart mouth, we get out the calculators and find that my 'newfangled' formula was actually slightly more accurate than his... so he asks me out in the hallway, writes me a hall pass for the year and asks me not to come back as there is nothing he could teach me. I spent all that year playing pool at the local bar during power mechanics. I guess all they did all year was fail at rebuilding briggs and stratton motors anyway. He was a nice teacher, but not real bright.
We got busted one night in the power mech shop. The school principal walked in at 2am and we were just finishing up a cam swap on a '69 GTO judge (think we stuck a new Isky cam in it... and it really was a ram air 4, 4 speed car with 4.10 posi! What a beast!) Anyway, he yelled and screamed at us, then we barked the motor up, broke in the cam and he asked if he could take it for a drive. My buddy had to go buy some new rear tires after that, but our principal was happy and we got off scott free.
Well, I graduated a year and change ago, and I'm happy to say that there's still great teachers around. A buddy and I spent our grade 11 year turning wrenches on an old 65 Rambler blue marlin. I distinctly remember having my hand slip off a wrench when working on the ol' rust bucket on my spare, a class was writing their exam and I had to make the walk of shame over too the sink dripping blood. Apparently we were about as quiet as water buffalo. However me and my 3 class mates learned a lot. The phrase "Suck, squeeze, bang, blow" comes to mind.
This happened during my first year of teaching. I was always glad that it didn't happen to one of my students, but I used it as a teaching story for 40+ years. Hope some good has come from it. In the small town where I was teaching there was a single mom that got into the gas station/diner business to support her family. While she cooked and ran the books, her teen aged son and his teenage cousin pumped gas (remember that?) and did mechanical work in the back room. The garage got to be a real mess. So, one Saturday morning they moved everything out of the shop area and gave it a real cleaning. Unfortunately, they decided to get the grease off the floor by scrubbing it with gasoline. When the fumes got to the water heater the explosion blew the front out of the station, killing the cousin and burning the son so badly that he was in the burn unit for months. After multiple surguries he began to look somewhat 'normal'. He later worked for me, and I can tell you that the scars were more than physical. Please do not use gasoline for cleaning anything! Pound for pound it has 16 times the explosive energy of dynamite!!!!!!!!
Yet another oxy-ace balloon story.. Back in about 2002 I was in the first class my auto shop teacher ever taught... Great man and teacher, but a little green... He filled the balloons, oxy and ace about the size of a softball... The mix gas was about the size of a basketball... No stick on the torch, dude just held it in his hand.. Lit the first two, just little pops, so he hit the third (mix gas)... I've never seen 30 kids jump at one time! Chairs went flying, couple people hit the deck, and had the whole high school made it to the shop in about 20 seconds.. Teacher landed on his ass but was totally ok other then a bruised ego. Don't think he ever gave that demo again...
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