How Do You Best Learn About Mechanical Stuff?
 

Well, the thread title says it all. Let's hear from you. Please share your learning experiences as well.

For me personally, I learn the best by just tinkering with stuff - taking things apart.

I recently helped a friend lift his 1997 Ford Ranger pickup. I now have enormous understanding as to how the Twin I Beam suspension system works. Before now, it was just a black hole of a mystery in my head.

I also bought a used gas powered weedwacker the other day. I took it all apart and now I know just what it takes to make that string whip around so fast.

So, what did you learn and how did you learn it?

Well I'm learning with help from everyone's favorite Engineer/Woodie Flowers Award Winner and just toying around with stuff. Plus, I'm working on a summer design project involving basic-ish mechanics just to get my feet wet. It seems to be working, but that's just me.

I basically find old things that are of no use anymore, and try to pull the good components from them out and mix and match, just to see what interesting things I come out with. I'm personally wanting to make some system involving old parts and robot controllers to make an automated machine to get both the pit crew and programmers involved in creating a system.

This is a good thread. There are lots of ways to learn about mechanical stuff. I'll try to share how I've learned over the years.

1. Alot of stuff has been designed and developed by many smart people over the years. Study what they have done. Know that very smart people, thousands of years ago could build stuff like this.

2. Know your basics... memorize your trigonmetric functions and conversions. Do your homework and be able to walk through a story problem. I use basic physics and trig every day, while I seldom use Calculus (but other engineers use it more).

3. Like the guys said above, be confident to take apart stuff and put it back together. I have found out that if a mechanical contraption is not working right, it can often be fixed by disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly. Work smart when disassembling things (label wires, etc.) so that re-assembly goes smoothly.

4. I get a kick out of assembling things that I buy at stores (grills, kids toys, pre-fab furniture) for my house... I follow the assembly instructions to a tee, and I am often critical of how some engineer communicated his idea through poorly written assembly instructions. Some of these instructions are good, some bad. It is good to know the difference and I am a better engineer from seeing their mistakes in communication.

5. My mom married a hog farmer when I was 14. My step father is 65 and still works every day of the week, mostly 10-12 hour days. He can fix anything on his farm from electrical work to welding, 'cause he has to. I have worked aside my step-father and I have learned to respect his hard work. He has no care for electronics, computers or all of this robot stuff - but he still respects what I do. I have learned alot from him... it takes hard work to get things done, it takes guts to try things that you may not know how to to do, and you always have to get the job done - no matter what tools or materials you have to work with.

6. (this is the most important one of all) I have learned very much from the skilled labor who I work with. My job is to design machines for Delphi-Delco production lines. I cannot fabricate parts or assemble these machines... UAW skilled labor guys do this. Some of these guys have been machining parts, wiring robots, and debugging equipment for 40 years. Most of them work hard and know how to make things work. I learn from them. It is a rare time when I release a print package that does not have a mistake in it. If these guys would want to make me look bad, then they could make minimal effort to make my design work, but if we work as a team, then they take ownership in "our" machine and they make the thing work. I look up to these guys and I have learned how many mechanical contraptions work through them. They have seen guys like me come and go often, while they are still there making machines.

So... be curious and have the confidence to learn things by using your hands, do your homework and study hard. But, most importantly, do not act like you are the smartest person in the world. Understand that not only can you learn from other experienced engineers, but also mechanics, farmers, and craftsmen.

Good luck,
Andy B.

I know it been said, but I'll just say it again, the Best way to learn is to do, by do I mean Take it apart, and put it back together. Even making stuff from scratch, I loved legos when I was a kid, also lincon(sp?) Logs were another favorite toy of mine. I was always the one in the family who noticed something wasnt working right and tried to fix it. I get it from my Dad, who like Andy's Step Father worked on a farm most of his natural born life, He was driving tractors when he was 12. I always try to learn as much as I can from other people. Then Later in life put it to good use. Sorry about the post jumping all over the place, I guess what I'm trying to say is, Just take it apart and you will learn more than any book can teach you on the subject.

Hm, I'll either talk to dad or research online...

Most research somehow ends up here:

www.howstuffworks.com :)

Well said, Andy!

Especially point #6.

Here's my own extra points.
1. Play with Legos. They've become remarkably sophisticated.

2. When you disassemble, remember to reassemble. If you cannot do that, you haven't learned as much about what you've taken apart as you might think.

3. Look at each "feature" in what you have disassembled and figure out what function it satisfies. Are there other ways to satisfy that function?

4. The math is there to help you understand the mechanics. Once you have a grasp on mechanics, it will shape your thinking about how things work.

don't forget to read
 

Theres been a lot of good advice given here in this great thread. A couple more things:

There are often good books or detailed magazines that focus on the topics that you are interested in. For example, when I was growing up, I was interested in cars and engines, so I spent a lot of time reading magazines like Hot Rod, Popular Hot Rodding, etc. They often have detailed articles - with lots of pictures - that explain engine rebuild projects. Usually they have more understandable detail than what you might find on the web. And since the magazines are usually entertaining, they do not make you feel like you are studying.

Shop manuals for the various devices that you are taking apart - and putting back together of course - are usually a good source of info that give insight into how or why something works.

I'll bet many of the engineers in FIRST took their bikes apart hundreds of times - this is probably the first real unsupervised exposure to tools/mechanics that a lot of kids have (I mean, wheres your dad/mom/brother/sister when your chain falls off?).

Ken

Just make sure you are not taking apart anything dagerous.:) A lot of stuff in your house really should never be opened up.

Watch TV

I forgot to mention that like someone else said, you can learn A LOT just from reading magazines, even the ads sometimes. I don't think I would have gotten into all this mechanical stuff like FIRST if it wasn't for magazines like Four Wheeler and R/C Car Action.

That brings up another thing, R/C cars can teach you soooo much about all sorts of different things by building them and tuning them.

Another great way to learn is to just spend an hour every now and then looking at exploded views and diagrams of mechanical assemblies.

I agree with the above posts, but I want to add...

See what doesn't work too. You can learn alot from failure. Look at broken things and figure out why they broke.

This is one of my favorite sites, although more biased toward ergo than mechanical.

hey guys i have learned in most of the ways that have been posted here, from howthingswork.com to taking apart different things. My next item to be taken apart on a large scale is a 1990 D.E.C. PrintServer Printer, its massive my dad worked for DEC, then Compaq and now HP so i get top see alot of mechanics and computer things through him and also by a major class in my school. As many of you have heard of Project Lead The Way, well it started in my area, at our sister school Shen ans one of the classes we have at our school is Principles of Engineering. If anyone else has that class or has the oppertunity to take it or any PLTW class, do so they are so awsome and a great learning experience. Also in P.O.E. i have learned everythin g from thermodynamics to Electrics, each unit is a a condensed verion of a full college semesters class. (If anyone want a project form the class or anything from it i have my notes and thigns i can copy for you, as a learning experience) ! Also i have learned many things jsut by tinkering around, including Electric Relays and transformers (partially also to POE). Well if you have any questions visit the PLTW website www.pltw.org or im me on aim dezdezdez25

~Mike

The Ideo philosophy: Fail Forward. By working with what you know, and learning when you observe it's faults. Don't be afraid to fail, don't be afraid to learn. Dig in, get your hands dirty, and most importantly- enjoy yourself. :)

I have a technoligical encyclopedia,

And i take A-LOT! of things apart!

I started small and watched a lot of people. Most notable was my dad who was a mechanic all of his life. When he saw that I could handle a tool, he gave me something that was already dead to take a apart. At six or seven I was taking apart carburetors if I could loosen the screws. I was bound and determined that if i took it apart I had to put it back together without extra parts laying out. I proceeded from that to disassembling anything that was dead or was being thrown out. That was a lot of vacuum cleaners, bikes, typewriters, kitchen appliances, etc. Not only did I learn what was wrong but why it had failed. Occasionally, I was able to actually make repairs. I also learned that there are somethings that just aren't worth fixing because they were a bad design to begin with.
VCR's are a good place to start. Everyone has one and they go bad once in a while. With the power unplugged, figure out how to get the top and bottom covers off. Note the type of screws you remove. Place the machine on a non-conductive surface, like a big piece of cardboard. From this point on, do not touch anything in side the machine! Plug in the power and insert a cassette. Using the remote press Play, fast forward, etc. and watch what parts move and how the tape is handled. Remove the power cord and see if you can get it back together.

Although you definitely learn more by taking something apart and putting it back together, don't let fear of getting it back together stop you. If you have something that already doesn't work and it would cost too much to repair it, you have nothing to lose by taking it apart even if you have to drill out rivets or break old brittle connectors. Sometimes sacrificing one device will allow you to learn enough to fix another one.

Also, just hang out with people who know how to tinker. Every mechanic and repairman I know loves to show off his skill as long as you are sincere and don't try to fake being an expert. If you show interest and want to learn they will teach you.

Also just one final note beware the capacitor. It is one of the most dagerous component to mess with. I went to take apart a microwave once but then I realized that it was not a good idea since it gave a warning on the back. The only thing I realized was that there might be capacitors inside and decided against taking it apart.

Adam,
Not all capacitors are dangerous. They can hold a charge for a long time, but most devices are designed to drain the charge off when the device is not in use.
The capacitor inside a microwave oven is part of a high voltage power supply for the magnetron (the tube that generates the high power RF) This power supply is generally in the kilovolt range (about 3 kv) Likewise the power supply in a color TV is also very high. The picture tube is actually the capacitor and sets these days are in the 30-40 kV range. Since the picture tube capacitor is a glass device, there is little resistance to drain off the charge. If the safety circuitry fails or the set is old enough to not have safeties, then that charge can stay there for months or years. Stay away from high voltage devices until someone shows you how to handle the voltage safely. That means microwaves, TV, computer monitors, neon lights, some back lights, video projectors, etc.

Yeah you usually can tell which devices are dangerous when it says do not take apart. Beam robots also are another good way to figure out how stuff works. They are small and very easy to build. They almost never rely on programming and the always rely on well thought out mechanics to get complex movements out of them.

Taking stuff apart is great to learn how things work BUT! ,This is Not good advice for doctors

DON'T DO ANY OF THIS!!!!

The ground in an electrical box is not the return of the high voltage power supply. Trying to discharge to an electrical box won't get you anywhere but severely shocked. In modern TVs and computer monitors, the high voltage power supply "floats" as well as most of the parts inside. In fact "ground" parts inside TVs actually are floating at about 150 volts when the set is plugged in.(It does not need to be on for the voltage to be present.) As I said, "Stay away from high voltage devices until someone shows you how to handle the voltage safely. "

I also learn about mechanical parts and processes best by reverse engineering. I don't normally have the time to take things apart... but I can normally envision how a certain item would work, or I'd look it up online if I ever got bored.

At work I am surrounded by numerous drawings for complex areonautical systems. I'd sometimes approach a schematic, follow it with my eyes, and gain a basic understanding of the device. To date, that's what has given me the biggest advantage.

I'm young and I'm not as knowledgable as some people, but I know I have plenty of time to practice designing, fabricating, and using certain mechanical systems. The best way to get started early is to just surround yourself with that kind of information, want to learn, be curious and inquisitive... but please, just don't hurt yourself :D

Most of the time I just play around with stuff....we all do :)

When I'm really interested in something, and it's a fairly major component of the American Lifestyle I'll go and look it up at www.howstuffworks.com , they have alot of good articles with good information and even better links at the end of the articles.

And of course, when I get really stuck, or REALLY curious I just call up one of my engineer friends at Baxter Lab and after a few call redirects I always manage to find a willing engineer with some spare time......gota love those people who give you their time and knowledge, they're great people, the engineer volunteers of FIRST

One night it was 2 AM and for some odd reason I found myself staring at the ceiling wondering how a CV joint works. I tried to envision it but just couldn't understand. I couldn't go back to sleep until I knew how it worked. So, I looked it up online and went back to bed and fell quickly asleep.

I just got a new TV! I get to take apart the old one. mabie i could use the cathode ray tube for a Laser beam?

watch out for the tube, like what has been posted in this thread all ready, it can still have a charge that can reach up into the kilovolts (1000's of volts) and can be very dangerous if your not sure what your doing... Also watch out not the rupture the tube for the gases inside can also be dangerous.
~Mike

I took it apart, didn't get shocked, got away with an electromagnet and an BIG compacitpr

cool, have fun with the magnet and how big was the compactor?
~Mike

And remember not to stick your hand near the hi-voltage while its on. Once I saw a silly guy using a screwdriver in a monitor and forgot it was on. A fat arc shot out of the high voltage cable and hit him. He was seeing stars for a few hours. Lucky he wasn't killed. Even though it has huge insulation, it doesn't have enough.

Some are visual while some need the hands on approach. I prefer hands on. But to really know that you have learned something - teach it to someone else. Amazing how much you really did not understand until trying to explain it to someone else.

Umm cathode ray tubes emit electrons.:) You can do some funky stuff to a black and white tv with a magnet though that you can't do with a color television. You can actually warp the picture with the magnet. You might want to try that with your old television too but if you do want to save it don't do it.

the CRT Magnets were fried, Thats why its an old tv

What you are calling an"electromagnet" did you take that off the neck of the CRT? If you did that is the "deflection yoke" and it has windings that sweep the electron beam left to right and top to bottom. The yoke is optimized for particular frequencies (vertical and horizontal sweep). If you took the coil off the shield that wraps around the back of the CRT that is the "degaussing coil" and it works for 60Hz with the shield steel running through it. If you have managed to get all that apart and did not get shocked, consider yourself very lucky!
For those of you just catching up on this thread, I want to remind everyone of the classic frog leg and electricity experiment. This experiment demonstrated that a frog's leg would react (by contracting) when connected to an electrical circuit. Your arm, hand, or even chest contain muscles that will react by contracting when subjected to electrical impulse. To carry this one step further, your heart is a muscle. As such it will also contract in the presence of electrical stimulus. Your heart may take a while before it begins to react to the millivolt signal being supplied by your brain following a kilovolt pulse. If you don't know what you are doing, you can be seriously hurt or worse. Don't fool around inside a TV without an advisor who knows how to handle these lethal potentials.

I know I don’t seem like the type, but I regularly take stuff apart just to see what it does. I used to strip my old sewing machine down to do a complete service on it regularly. Boy was that fun to see my ex-mother in law freak out when she walked in on me one day while taking it apart. It was always in great shape and worked well.

Yes, I’m a closet engineer! I admit it! Just promise you won’t tell any of my artsy friends!

I also have a bonus on learning about stuff because my father is the older grouchier variety “Dean”. He’s even 5’6” with dark hair and always wears denim work clothes even though he’s retired. He was a fabricator/mechanic by trade and now invents all kinds of crazy stuff (usually just to cheese off the neighbors). He is currently working on his own old fashioned type sterling in the back yard, just to see if he can do it. It will be the size of a small room when it’s finished. I get exposure to mechanical stuff, because he insists that I and my freakishly small hands are available to reach into tight spaces for him…….MEN!

that tv had not been pluged in for 5 or 6 weeks and i had removed the compacitors first

I know this may seem a foreign concept, but the Picture Tube is a big capacitor. It's dielectric is the glass envelope and it can hold a 40kV charge for years. (Yes that is years not months!) The other capacitors should have circuitry to drain the charge but they also may hold a hundred volt charge (or more) and should not be handled indiscriminantly.

lucky me then

praises to mr coffee ... Howstuffworks.com is pure genius

Fixing stuff in my car, in my home... but always "TRYING" to respect the ULTIMATE RULE:

"He who brakes a thing to find out what it's, has left the path of wisdom",

I always tried to have some knowledge about stuff that I tried to fix or develop.

learning new stuff using technology is most likely a hobby for me.... i love to do those kind of stuff such as making new stuff out of parts that i can find. but basically in the team there was 3 senior students who has taught me a lot and got me really interested in mechanical engineering. my whole career and my thought has changed after i joined first and started thinking more practically. the best way to learn about mechanical stuff is if you really be interested in mechanical engineer and if this kind of stuff doesnt get you bored. that is how i have learned a lot and now running the mechanical subteam for my team. :)

Tinker!
 

1) Develop a healthy curiousity! Don't be satisfied that the "car thingy works", find out WHY whatever you have works. So many times having a REAL understanding of how things work can save your heiny when it fails at a critical time.

FYI, during the blackout I watched people around the area panic within minutes of the power failure when their cell phones and other technology died, while I enjoyed a very nice time without power for days, kicking back in comfort with great food, gallons of clean water that I processed myself, light, entertainment, friends, etc.. I could even shower and shave with clean hot water without worries. Our block even threw a big party. I listened on my windup radio to the non-scientific mumbo jumbo flowing freely on the local FM stations, and called more than once to help correct misinformation. One entire FAMILY needed my help because NONE of them, even with the car manual in the car, could find and change a car fuse for the spare already there. <sigh> I'm confident ANY rookie FIRST student could've solved THAT one! :D

2) Tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker until you know the parts in your soul... (keeping safety in mind, of course!) What you read, you can easily forget. What you DO by practicing and experimenting until it's reflexive, is with you forever. :D Mess with unused kit parts. Explore the kit vendors' websites (like http://bimba.com ...) Tear apart that dead piece of technology and explore it. Quite often, once you understand it, you can easily fix it. Always TRY to fix your own widgetry before you throw it out. If you didn't use pneumatics at all this year on your bot, play with the air parts in last year's kit this fall until confident that you can whip together an actuator quickly.

3) Develop your "divergent thinking" skills. Find new uses for common household objects (like using a claw hammer as a weight :) ). Throughout life, whenever you have the time or the opportunity arises, explore alternatives to the traditional and PRACTICE THEM. Then, if "the normal way" doesn't work for some reason, you have instant "Plan B"s on hand in your mental toolbox that not only WORK, you've DONE it.

Do this enough, and you start looking at objects and materials with a "different set of eyes", seeing possibilities for those kit materials you never would have dreamed of before.

Ex: Just recently in a survival net group, I learned (then practiced to perfection) over a dozen unusual ways how to primitively start fires without matches in the wild with whatever is handy, including using: a chunk of found ice, a broken light bulb's glass (no electricity needed), a scrap of plastic sandwich wrap or zippy bag, slamming a stick in a tube, a wooden plow, a wooden saw, a hand drill, beating on a small piece of metal with a hammer, my belt, steel wool, or even a discarded cola can and some toothpaste or sand! VERY cool! By the end of the thread, we even started coming up with new variants (like a salad bowl), because we then all understood the underlying PRINCIPLES. I'll never think of fire starting in the wild as a "problem" in the same way ever again.

- Keith

I would definitely follow Kieth's suggestion's.

Recently, because I know a little about cars, I saved my mom from paying $685 for a $80 heater core.

Also, within the next week or so I will be changing my own spark plugs. Yay!

Another great place to learn about stuff is www.about.com particularly the automotive section

How hard is it to fix cars these days? I always thought with so much technology being put into the cars that it would be very hard to fix something wrong with it.

Your comment got me thinking a bit (Yeah yeah, I know, mark the date on the calendar!) about how one goes about tinkering and hacking. According to my dad, and various other engineers (some being related to FIRST teams, some not), most people learned about electronics (among other things) by taking apart, and even fixing, things like television sets, for instance. It used to be that you could go down to a library or surplus store, and buy a copy of your television's technical manual, published by Sam's (as I'm sure many of you are familiar with their modern books). This manual would give you all of the intricate technical details of components and even the specific signals between components, and by which you could learn all sorts of great things. However, nowadays, in the age of VLSI and (dare I sayeth) ULSI, you can't just do that. It's disheartening, to some extent...

Also, with appliances today wouldn't it be easier just to buy a new one instead of replacing the old one. Well truth be told I personally do not mind. Though this point does annoy me a bit that if my hybrid car ever breaks down I would have to take the thing to the dealer to have it fixed.

Exactly!

It's practically impossible to fix a broken appliance, nowadays. It's so much easier to toss it in a dumpster, drive down to the nearest Home Depot, or what-have-you, and buy yourself a new one. Chances are that what broke was something trivial to diagnose, and even less challenging to fix, but you can't work it out, yourself.

The exact same goes for car dealerships and maintenance. You're driving to the store, one day, and all of a sudden, you see a blinking light on the console. It's telling you that you "Need Maintenance." Great. You drive it to the dealer (or an authorized shop), where they use all sorts of computers and thousand dollar machines to find out that you needed to add some windshield wiper fluid, which they just so happened to do for you, and for which they charge precisely an arm and a leg and both your first and second born children. God forbid that something should actually break...

What a way civilization has turned, eh?

(I used exaggeration and hyperbole liberally. Please take with a grain of salt.)

I find that the easiest way to learn about anything mechanical is simply by doing it, getting you hands dirty and asking questions....you seem to figure out things as you go....

Actually I also believe it is due to the fact that its cheaper to toss it.:) It just is not worth it these days to repair certain items since they have gotten cheaper. Answering machines used to use complicated rods and timing mechanisms to get them to work. Now all they use is a cheap little microchip.

Funny this should come up. The other day a friend called to say that he couldn't come over as planned. His car (a 1970 Dodge Dart) wouldn't start.

So I went over to give him a hand with it. I dragged my 14 year old son along with me so he could share the experience. On the way out I grabbed my timing light and tach/dwell meter.

When we got there, he went to show us what it wasn't doing, and it fired right up. Mechanics syndrome strikes again! But we went ahead and checked the timing dwell and idle speed anyway, since we had all of the stuff out.

Since the problem hasn't recurred, we figure he probably just "flooded" the carborator, possibly due to trying to start it with a low battery. He had a battery charger on when we arrived and enough time had passed that the flooding could have cleared by itself.

Thinking about it later I realized I hadn't had those things out since before my son was born!. During that time all of our cars have had electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition. So flooding rarely happens and the dwell never gets off, unless something is fried. In which case the problem is obvious.

A whole realm of experience passed off of the scene and I never even noticed.

ChrisH

I was reading this book about off-road driving and it talked about this guy who made a bunch of money by freeing stuck cars from the sand on the beach. People who's cars were stuck would ask this guy for assistance and he would ask them for $40. Once the money was payed, he would air down the tires to a low PSI and drive the car right out. He then told the people to re-inflate the tires as soon as possible and have a nice day.

I know this isn't really how one learn's but it's just a fun little trick that's very useful.

Reverse engineering, whether it be on purpose or accidentally. 'Nuff said.

Re: How Do You Best Learn About Mechanical Stuff?
 

That's about how I learn how to do things to. I like to take things apart and put them back together and if it works fine if not I'll just go out and buy another one =)

As for classroom trainingI prefer the teacher just showing me physically how metal is welded or how to use high tech tools or even attach something correctly rather them writing on a board of giving out handouts or making speeches that make no sense I will not hesitate to fall asleep for such things.

The way I look at it theres 24 hours in one day and If I don't get it right the first time around I have plenty of time to correct the mistake and try it again.