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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 50

IV. Machine-Shop Work

IV. Machine-Shop Work.

In the machine shop, owing to the inevitable lack of tools, the class-work is less uniform. It is practically impossible to furnish a class of twenty students with twenty lathes, twenty planers, and twenty drills, etc., etc. The page 28 size and cost of such a shop puts the matter out of discussion; the cost of the tools in the present shop exceeded $5,000, exclusive of the engine and shafting.

Nevertheleas, the instruction is given with an approach to regularity; the practice is as uniform as the tools will allow. The course includes chipping, filing, polishing, turning, drilling, boring, screw-cutting, scraping, planing, etc., and all the details of fitting and finishing.

During the second term the members of the class, either singly or in groups, enter upon the construction of their projects for finished work.

Throughout the year a detail is made from each shop-division to study the management of the engine and boilers, under the direction of a competent engineer.

Five upright steam engines of about five horse-power each, the work of the students, were set up and run by the members of the graduating class in June last.

[Extract from the Report of the Director, June, 1883.]

"The construction of machines as extensive as these engines you just saw run has been at the expense of more uniform class-work, and it is quite possible that next year we shall aim more at instruction and less at construction. During the year, the second-year class have forged one hundred tools for the turning shop, seventy for the machine shop, forty-six tools for the forges themselves (including forty pairs of tongs), and other outside jobs, making a total of two hundred and eighty tools or jobs, exclusive of regular exercises, and not included in the work on exhibition. A word of warning may be necessary to those who have been chiefly interested in the development of our tool instruction. The time spent in shop-work has never exceeded two hours per day, unless the page 29 boys have voluntarily remained after hours, that is, after 3:20 o'clock, for additional practice. Moreover, from these two hours should be subtracted fully fifteen minutes for washing, dressing, etc. A week, therefore, represents less than nine hours of actual work in a shop. Hence, in placing a value upon the time spent, as men count time, you should remember that a "day's work" is all the boys have had per week. For carpentry and wood-turning they have had three hundred and eighty hours, or thirty-eight days; in blacksmithing three hundred and eighty hours, and in machine-shop work, three hundred and eighty hours. They are thus boys of very limited practice, and while they ought to have an intelligent idea of tools and their uses, of the laws of mechanism, and of the properties of wood, iron, steel and brass, we ought not to expect finished work from their hands."