I am interested in your story

jwmay

jwmay

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H-M Supporter Gold Member
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I doubt often come to this forum, because I had been serving as an electrician at work for the last 7 years. My standard advice has almost always been, "hire an electrician" regarding electrical issues.
But I've been reading through, and I see several of you are quite well versed in electrical principles. So well versed in fact, that my own knowledge seems quite shallow in depth, and narrow in breadth.
I want to know if you can tell a story as to how you learned so much. I am a reader, and have studied electrical troubleshooting not only in college, but on the job. I have only ever met a couple people who could find the problem and fix it as fast as I could. But I'm a novice compared to you guys. What gives? What's your story?
 
Start early like about age 5. Most great musicians start early also. That, plus about 20,000 hours will get you there
I didn't learn Ohm's law until much later, in my late teens, but was playing with electronics well before that. My math skills are terrible, by the way, but I didn't let that stop me
-Mark
PS I always loved Christmas, not so much for the religious aspects, but for the lights. I always looked forward to the lights LOL my grandpa always left a few loose ones on his tree for me to find and fix :)
 
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I go back a long ways. My father was a ham radio operator and that rubbed off. My first job
was at a radio and TV shop. Electronics and electrical stuff has always held an interest for me.
High voltage does not scare me, only gives me a high respect for it. Back in the 70's I built a lot
of Heathkits and Eicos and eventually graduated to building my own radios from junk parts. My hamshack
looks like a disaster to some but all familiar stuff to me. I don't throw much away. I love old tubes
and building old time radios using them. Occasionally I will take on an electrical job that no
electrician will tackle. I'm not sure if that is dumb or smart but I take it a personal challenge.

73,
 
I think I can cover it in two words: curiosity and necessity. And I suppose in no small part there always being books and things to tinker with at home when I was young, then college tutors who put me through extra classes. Then came the internet...
A mate of mine is a sparky, but I'm not sure even he'd have taken on internally rewiring a motor intended for only 440V to run on 220 (I'm not talking a simple external star to delta swap here). You'd never do that in a pro environment - it would be insane. But as a hobbyist and tinkerer, you're free of commercial concerns and at liberty to explore things from first principals. For a lighting ring, I'm probably going to call the sparky, but for stuff that's outside "normal", I know enough to work safely and figure difficult problems out that a pro might dismiss because it wouldn't be commercially viable to invest the time figuring out.
*Nobody else is going to do this for me* is and has been a great driver for me.
Research is so ridiculously easy these days too, though you need to avoid the trap of those who "know a thing can't be done." The internet says that running my Bridgeport on 220V isn't possible. I now have a Bridgeport that says otherwise and have now returned that knowledge to it. But the internet also furnished me with enough vaguely related info to bootstrap my knowledge up to a level where I was confident enough that I could remove the motor core already having a good idea what I'd find, separate the windings and rearrange the connections in a way that I deduced would work for the lower voltage application, crucially without paying somebody to put different windings in at great expense. I guess it comes down to the professional and the hobbyist having very different pressures and constraints.

And in closing: I'm a huge fan of the BigClive YouTube channel. He's a pro electrician, but also a keen hobbyist. Check out his channel if you haven't already!
 
I started this path at age 5. My father (an Engineer) gave me lots of training. I had a workbench, soldering iron, and a Simpson meter which I worked with in the garage, about the time I started kindergarten.
 
I was fortunate to work a bunch under the table with a journeyman master electrician doing commercial work so got a shed load of experience there. I have wired my own renos and passed inspections so I feel good about that. As @Lo-Fi said so well, there is a ton of info on the web now... You just have to be able to discern the dreck from gold.
 
In grade school I helped my dad build a number of Heathkit and Knightkit products. I learned Ohm's law at an early age. My science fair projects were heavy on the electrical engineering side. I went to college and got my BSEE and MSEE degrees, then did failure analysis on integrated circuits for 40 years. A lot of the products used some sort of computer interface to configure them, so I also became familiar with C programming (mostly via Arduino).

Failure analysis was fun because I got to work in a number of disciplines -- EE (naturally), solid state physics, chemistry, material science, high vacuum work, mechanical engineering, machining and computer programming, among others. It was a job where use of the scientific method to track down failures was as familiar as breathing. I also got to work on developing new/improved failure analysis techniques and tools, many of which required a lot of debugging to get to work right -- if they ever did :) Not every supposedly brilliant idea turned out to be one!

Although I've been retired for a bit over 5 years I still design and lay out circuit boards for various home projects. As my wife says, once an engineer, always an engineer :).
 
When I was five, I held my Dad's tools as he renovated and rewired the lower floor of the 2 story we lived in.
I learned physics in grade school and built a working atom smasher for grade 7 science fair.
Moved on to computers in HS and started building them.
Engineering in U, then did renovations on my own after.
Started helping guys in industrial bays wire their 3phase stuff.
After that, worked for an electrician for fun doing primary work - pulling wires, etc, and watched very carefully what he did. an learned tons of the electrical code.

Mostly I'm curious and love to learn stuff.
 
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