I feel one of the great holes in my education is as a mechanic, and while I've picked up a bit along the way, I still stumble across things (like making gaskets) that are well-known, just not by me.
Ideally, I'm looking for breadth-not-depth, with an emphasis on practical applications and tips / tricks.
Fair warning: he does veer into politics from time to time, but while I don’t agree with his political viewpoints, this guy knows his way around a welder.
Some endeavours warrant high capitalisation and well-within-service-life equipment.
A lot of times that stuff gets run long beyond its useful life because new machinery cannot be rationalized for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this comment. You can do it and still have an overall reliable operation. You just can't make assumptions about your equipment running perfectly all the time when you plan out the policies and procedures for the rest of your operation. Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast.
Take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.
Must like in software, the people doing the work and the people who choose what work is done and with what budget are almost separate circles on a Venn diagram.
Please, as a wise man once said, take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.
On a new ship or machine, bearings are smooth. Fasteners are clean and crisply torqued, you break them free once with equal torque and subsequently can turn them out with your fingers. Hoses and wires are flexible and strong. Everything is at the beginning of its service life, and after a break-in period, likely has many years of trouble-free operation ahead.
The process for, say, installing a new gasket? 1. Turn the bolts loose with a ratchet and socket. 2. Remove old gasket. 3. Install new gasket. 4. Reinstall bolts, torquing to spec. Estimated time: 20 minutes.
Not so on an old girl.
Step 1. Wipe off the congealed grease and oil from leak above. Wire brush the paint and rust underneath so you can get the socket over the bolt head. Attempt to turn bolt loose. Get extension pipe for ratchet. Get impact driver. Apply heat with propane torch. Apply heat with oxyacetylene torch. Repeat escalation for each bolt, except #6 which breaks off in the blind hole, that will need to be drilled out and have a thread insert installed. 2. Maintenance used RTV silicone last time instead of gasket. Brush, scrape, and stone that silicone-covered, corrosion pitted surface to clean, flat metal. The more time you take here, the better the repair will be, but you're on your back in the dark instead of in the machine shop working on new metal. 3. Gasket not available commercially this time this time either, re-apply RTV silicone for the next guy to deal with (probably you). 4. Bolts are stretched from heat and corroded so don't thread in smoothly, heads rounded over, (and one broke), so buy new bolts, which still don't thread in because threaded holes are likewise corroded. Run tap into threaded holes, avoiding contamination of interior with metal chips. Reinstall bolts. Torque to spec, as if that would keep this thing from coming loose and leaking again in a couple months. Elapsed time: 4 hours.
And it needs service like,this all the time, because everything is at the end of its useful life.
It's a lot like working with a buggy and brittle legacy codebase instead of doing green-field development.