What a truly wonderful thread this is turning out to be
Since we're venturing outside electrical stuff and so many people have shared their stories in such lovely detail, I'll elaborate a little more on mine.
I started with a love of tractors. It was my first word! Not Mum or Dad. Tactor! At, I believe, age 4, my parents bought be a Lego tractor set:
And this started it all off..... I was a little too young for it still, but Dad helped me build it and I loved it... If only it had a trailer... Lego thankfully brought out a set with a front loader and trailer, I loved that too and I was hooked on Lego. At 10, I was into Technic aimed at 14+. My grandfather, who sadly passed away when I was 5, was our kind of tinkerer, so Grans place was full of treasure.... Tools, materials, space to work. We had a little room called "the den" that was packed full floor to ceiling mostly with woodworking stuff. I messed about with wood, but with nobody really to teach me, I was a little directionless and never really got particularly into it. I remember everything seeming very hard compared to Lego which you could simply piece together and making working mechanisms. It seems absurd now, but I've never forgotten that feeling I had of "How to people design and make stuff? Real stuff". It just seemed like too tall a task at that age!
When I was maybe 10, Dad took me to a Mechano fair, which was wonderful. I remember spending what seemed like hours playing with an epicyclic gearbox, marvelling at the arrangement of gears and being entirely fascinated. So I got some Mechano! At 14 ish, I was still enjoying both Lego and Mechano, but finding it somewhat limited and ventured into radio control. My form tutor at school happened to be the tech teacher, and he was kind enough to let me loose around the workshop. Sadly, the school had closed their metalworking shop the year I joined, but there was still stuff around to play with. For my tech GCSE I designed and built what can only be described as a ducted fan version of the V22 Osprey. It never flew well, I was attempting something way out of my league, but I learned an enormous amount doing it and received help from all sorts of people. I think that's what made me realise that if you want to get anything really technical built, you need machine tools, and somehow befriended the old clockmaker in the village. He taught me loads! His sons were not in the least bit interested in engineering, so I think he enjoyed passing on his knowledge. He was a funny old boy. Thin as a rake, rapier quick with a very dry sense of humour, smoked 60 a day in his tiny workshop in a corner of his garage which was packed full of decades of tools, book, clocks, clock parts. He was kind enough to let me set my first lathe up in his garage. I forget where I scrounged it from, but he taught me the basics and left me to it under a watchful eye.
My tool collection grew. I learned from books and anybody who could teach me anything. My little workshop eventually moved into the cellar at Grans place having outgrown the clockmakers garage. Later on I got into cars and rented a small workshop with a couple of mates on some old military land and had a riot taking cars apart, building crazy contraptions and generally making a "lot of smoke and noise" as the chap next door who built drag racing cars put it. Good times. I got my first welder and taught myself to weld and fabricate. Rebuilt some engines. Put a V8 in a tiny Diahatsu Hijet sandwich van. Sadly much of it didn't get photographed as the camera phone was only just invented at the end of this particular era!
But that's not the end of the story.... Somewhen around 2003, I went on a trip with Dad to a steam railway centre, which I'd done lots as a child, but never an adult. In the workshop, there was a little board saying "we need more volunteers". It had never even occurred to me that working on a steam engine was an available thing to do. I found one of the guys and enquired, somewhat tentatively. "Great, he said! What can you do?" "Well, I can do a bit of MIG welding, I can use a lathe, I work on cars a lot..." "Can you start next weekend? I'll take you to meet the chap you runs the project!". Getting my hands dirty on a steam engine was (and still is) a dream come true. Every desire I'd ever had to solve every problem I never knew existed was suddenly in front of me, but best of all, steam restoration attracts people with skills... All of a sudden I had access to machinists, welders, platemakers, fitters.... What more can you ask for? I spent a decade working on that project, just soaking in the knowledge. When that finished, I moved on to another, then another and I've now wound up running two projects myself - one a heavy overhaul of a complete loco, the other taking up the reigns on a restoration project that's nearing completion.
In amongst all this, the internet as we know it came along. A passing comment from a mate about this hilarious guy on YouTube called AvE led me to This Old Tony. This Old Tony made me decide I really, really needed a milling machine and a few tens of thousands of pounds worth of other machine tools and led me to other amazing YouTubers like Tom Lipton, Robin Renzetti and Stefan Gotteswinter. YouTube turbo-charged my machining knowledge and ability. I can do stuff now that I didn't even know about to dream of ten years ago. And I still don't have all the tools I want. Thankfully, the railway does...
I'm on the verge of going pro as an engineer/machinist. Life led me into fixing computers for a living, which has been very good to me as a profession, but is, frankly, a waste of my engineering skills. An opportunity has come up in a steam workshop and it's looking like the stars may align for me to take it....
In closing, something I think we'll all relate to: "Will he be able to lead a normal life?" "No. He'll be an engineer"
