How Do You Best Learn About Mechanical Stuff?

[kmcclary]

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!

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. 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