[KenWittlief]

Ive usually been on the electical team as a mentor, but Ive always been close friends with the mechanical engineers on the team, and theres a couple things we have observed over the years.

Guys are more likely to have mechanical experience. They are more likely to take their bicycles apart when they are kids, tinker with lawn mower engines, help dad change the oil in the car, and get all that black grease and oil all over them. Thats just the way things are in our culture.

But heres the thing: guys learn a lot of bad habits this way, they are more likely to use brute force on something, they are more likely to grab a hand drill when they should be using a drill press, more likely to wack a bearing with a hammer when they should be using an arbor press

but girls on FIRST teams, who work on the mechanical subteams, have to learn most things from scratch, and as a result, they learn from the mentors how to do things right. Metal fabrication in a shop is done with power tools, powerfull machines that have motors up to 10HP. You dont force a professional machine tool, you need a light touch on the controls. If a bit is dull a guy is more likely to pull on the handle with both hands (and bugger up the work), while a girl is more likely to take the bit and get it sharpened.

There is absolutely no doubt that girls can do excellent machine shop work. We tend to forget what happend from 1940 to 1945, when most of the men in the US went off to war, and the women stepped up to the plate, and built the tanks and jeeps and aircraft that won the war.

So ironically, if girls on the team are willing to overcome the fear of trying something new, the fear of messing things up, they often end up being better machinists than the guys, because they are learning to do things the right way, and they dont have the attitude of "I all ready know how to use powertools..."

and BTW, when you work on old cars and bikes and motors you get all dirty and greasy, but when you fabricate new machine parts in a shop, everything is shiney and clean and new. I love the smell of machine oil in the morning :^)