On Wednesday I finally finished my drill drift. I say finally as it took me longer than everybody else. Two reasons I think. Firstly, I'm slow as I try to be such a perfectionist, and secondly most people seemed to cut corners near the end to get it finished. I probably could have spent about another hour on it getting it more perfect (there were still bits that I wasn't quite happy with), but I was told it was ok to hand it in for marking as it was. Photo here.
We were also given our portfolio folders and MNTB work books for the workshop. The MNTB work book shows all the projects we will have to work on while at college and at sea throughout all 5 phases. The drill drift we just finished is not something which will go towards our course, but the next project which we have begun will do.
So, after being given these new portfolios and finishing the drift, I began the new project: A general fitting plate. We were all given a piece of 5mm thick mild steel of size 80 x 80mm. Two edges were already flat and smooth, but two were rough. First job was to file one edge down to be square and smooth. Then I marked it with engineers red for cutting down to 75 x 80mm. I made the cut with the hack saw, cutting very close to the line to save me a lot of time in filing. This worked well and caught me up with most people, which was satisfying. I filed this edge down until square so now I had a 75 x 80mm piece accurate to 0.2mm. Mr Laker inspected it and ran it through the DTI to see the accuracy. He was happy, so I could move on to marking it out with all the lines necessary for drilling and cutting to it's final shape. See photo attached - lots of lines.
Once I had marked all this out (took a long time), I could centre punch the bits for drilling, use the centre drill, then drill the 5mm holes and the single 12mm hole. I then cut off the marked corners and began the painstaking part of making the inner hack saw cuts towards the holes (see photos below). After seeing some other people's cuts, I decided to take mine very slowly to avoid having to start my piece again. I've almost finished the final cut to the centre hole - this is the longest one. I'm pretty happy with how they've come out, although they're not perfect. All I have to do next time is finish off that last cut, then lots of filing to get it accurate to the diagram. One of my cuts is perilously close to the line....if I have gone too far, or take off too much when filing I will have to start again. I hope I will have good news for you next time...
Oh, and our Thursday workshop was ended earlier so our year could have another explanation about plaigiarism and the "turnitin" system (electronic anti-plagiarism tool) here. This was a repeat of a previous lecture we'd had - not sure if they were trying to be ironic or not.
Finally, I come to Friday and long the awaited Maths test. I think my main word to describe it was "short". Short on time that is. A lot of people agree that we should have had more time to do the paper. I left one of the parts until last and didn't have time to finish this. Annoying, but nothing we can do I guess. The test was also harder than any of the three test papers I had done. It included a question where you had to prove the formula method of solving quadratics by completing the square - this is the question I didn't have time to go back and finish properly. I was a bit annoyed to see this question on the paper, as although it had been covered at one point, it is not even necessary to know this to be able to solve quadratics. I can use all of the methods successfully without this!
Following our exam, we had Marine Engineering Principles, where we continued our study of the two stroke diesel, noting why the cross head two stroke diesel engine is more favoured than the trunk piston two stroke diesel engine. In the afternoon we had another session of Spiral Induction. Bizarrely we covered plaigirism again, and now we have an assignment where we can learn more about "turnitin". We all understand the importance of the program and plagiarism, but we're feeling a little overwhelmed by how much it's been covered.
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