A week with the apprentices in the grinding shop
Priya and Tom are in their second year. We followed them from Monday's safety briefing to Friday's inspection. (Fiction, for the demo.)
Demo post. ACME Ltd is a fictional Sheffield tool maker, invented to show the free Blog Tool working on a real site. The advice is genuine; the company is not.
ACME's apprenticeship started in 2016 with four places a year. Priya Shah and Tom Bennett are in their second year, and they let us follow them for a week. (Everyone in this post is invented for the demo.)
Monday: safety first, every week
The week starts with ten minutes on the grinding shop floor: guards, eye protection, ear defenders, and who is first-aider this week. It is the same ten minutes every Monday, and nobody skips it.
Tuesday and Wednesday: college
Two days at college for the engineering theory - materials, drawings, measurement.
Thursday: at the wheel
Priya is grinding chisel bevels for the next batch. "You learn to listen to the wheel," she says. "The sound changes before the steel does."
Friday: inspection
Tom checks the week's planes for flatness with a straightedge and feeler gauges. Anything out by more than five hundredths of a millimetre goes back to be lapped again.
Keep reading
Welcome to the ACME workshop blog
Why a tool maker keeps a blog, and what you will find on this one. (A demo post on Domma CMS.)
Cordless or corded: which drill for a first workshop?
For most first workshops the answer is a cordless combi drill. Here is when it is not.
Sharpening a chisel in ten minutes
Flatten the back once, hone a small secondary bevel, and a blunt chisel is back to shaving end grain before the kettle boils.