gloves for mechanics?

[Gareth]

I am so sorry I meant to type hands..Please forgive my typo I meant no offense

Dtrain

Absolutely none given I assure you, and certainly no need to apologise.

[AimlessWanderer]

I am so sorry I meant to type hands..Please forgive my typo I meant no offense

Dtrain

Absolutely none given I assure you, and certainly no need to apologise.

Absolutely 
Made my eyes water and gave me a bloody good chuckle, but certainly no offense taken mate 
Best typo in ages 

[Dtrain]

I appreciate....Despite my Embarrassment I am glad that everyone had a Good laugh...Especially in the Times we live in!

[turnsouth]

Wish I had nads that could break light bulbs...

[Dtrain]

I am staying clear of that one...I have already caused enough damage to this thread..However on a serious note..My Father is proof that years in a Proffession such as a Mechanic can take it's Toll on HANDS if not properly protected as one practices his or her Proffession. As a Truck Driver I very rarely do any of the required tasks when it comes to Pre Trip/Inter Trip Inspections Hooking/Dropping my Sets or Loading/Unloading the Trailers without some sort of HAND protection.

Dtrain

[turnsouth]

On a serious note: I've been working on cars for 35 years, the last 25 professionally. and though my hands are calloused and have the appearance of a laborer's hands, I do take care of them. Good quality hand cleaner with moisturizers, cuts are tended to quickly, and I exercise them to prevent carpal tunnel. I also try and wash a sink full of dishes once a week or so, which really helps in keeping the stains out of my thick callouses.

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

I am staying clear of that one...I have already caused enough damage to this thread..However on a serious note..My Father is proof that years in a Proffession such as a Mechanic can take it's Toll on HANDS if not properly protected as one practices his or her Proffession. As a Truck Driver I very rarely do any of the required tasks when it comes to Pre Trip/Inter Trip Inspections Hooking/Dropping my Sets or Loading/Unloading the Trailers without some sort of HAND protection.

Dtrain

I worked as a bike mechanic when I was in college and for the most part was able to get by without gloves.  Of course, bikes aren't much like cars, so it's not nearly as much of an issue.  At the same time, I got plenty of bloody knuckles from pulling cranksets and gear clusters off of bikes to do bottom bracket and hub overhauls...  I even learned to overhaul those old Sturmey 3 speed hubs too. 

I eventually got careless about gloves until I was cleaning up a gear cluster in the Safety-Kleen tank without using the gloves, when some of the solvent got on a scrape I had...    Oh man did that smart!!!  I was a LOT more careful about wearing gloves with the Safety-Kleen after that...

On a side note, It was always amusing to me when we'd get someone in the shop who was an auto mechanic who tried to fix his own bike...  They figure after working on cars, how hard can a bicycle be?  They're actually completely different animals though... there's no automotive equivalent that I know of to truing a bike wheel with a spoke wrench in a jig...  there's a whole lot of voodoo in that, let me tell you!

[turnsouth]

I even learned to overhaul those old Sturmey 3 speed hubs too. 

Man, I remember the first time I took one of those apart (or at least the American "borrowed" version where it was a pin and lever instead of a pull chain that shifted), and I remember my mother that day too 

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

I even learned to overhaul those old Sturmey 3 speed hubs too. 

Man, I remember the first time I took one of those apart (or at least the American "borrowed" version where it was a pin and lever instead of a pull chain that shifted), and I remember my mother that day too 

LOL! Yeah, I bet she was PO'd...   There are a whole lotta small parts in one of those things...

The guy who taught me how to rebuild them had been working in bike shops for about 25 years and was a 3 speed aficionado... he actually showed me how you could rebuild them without reusing two or three of the small parts they have inside.  That was a good 20 years ago though, and I haven't even seen one in nearly that long... not that I'm missing them or anything...

[Dtrain]

@ Hienz.....I try and fix my Bike Old Scwhwin Impact when need be but I have always realized they are just as complicated as a car in their own way. When I suddenly feel lost I take it to a shop

Dtrain

[turnsouth]

It's not too bad, there is only about 30 parts (closer to sixty if you count the ball bearings... )

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

@ Hienz.....I try and fix my Bike Old Scwhwin Impact when need be but I have always realized they are just as complicated as a car in their own way. When I suddenly feel lost I take it to a shop

Dtrain

That they are...  Bikes are very different because the systems are very interrelated in their functioning... how well one part often makes a significant difference in terms of how well another works.  It's almost like they're empathic or something... I don't know how to describe it...  The only thing I can think of to say is that in my time working as a bicycle mechanic, I found much of what I learned to be more intuitive than specific.  Not sure if that makes sense though...  Once you've been working on bikes for a while you just develop a 'feel' for them, and it can be quite difficult to explain how that cashes out when you're actually wrenching on a bike.

Wheels really are the epitome of this with a bike too... and really, they are quite amazing pieces of engineering when you think about it.  A spoked bicycle wheel is basically a suspension bridge that anchors to itself... and when it's rolling and bearing weight, it actually carries the load by the top spokes, not the bottom ones, so the bike is actually hanging from the top of the rim instead of being held up by the bottom of it.  I built over 100 wheels in my day, and developed a reputation as a top notch wheel builder; I even ended up doing some wheel building for a handful of pro racers back then.  Those were the days... 

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

It's not too bad, there is only about 30 parts (closer to sixty if you count the ball bearings... )

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the horror!!!

the horror!!!

What I remember most about them was those darn little pull-rods with the chain on them... they had a tendency to bend or strip their threads.  I can't ever forget the numerous clods who came into the different shops I worked in who had actually broken one of them off, with the threaded part still embedded inside the hub... ugh.  No one was ever pleased to hear how much it cost to replace such a simple part...  that was always the problem with them... weakest link in the system. 

[turnsouth]

...It's almost like they're empathic or something... I don't know how to describe it...

Wheels really are the epitome of this with a bike too... and really, they are quite amazing pieces of engineering when you think about it.  A spoked bicycle wheel is basically a suspension bridge that anchors to itself... and when it's rolling and bearing weight, it actually carries the load by the top spokes, not the bottom ones, so the bike is actually hanging from the top of the rim instead of being held up by the bottom of it.  I built over 100 wheels in my day, and developed a reputation as a top notch wheel builder; I even ended up doing some wheel building for a handful of pro racers back then.  Those were the days... 

When it comes to wheels, there is definitely some sort of Karmic harmony to assembling one, something I never mastered...
Gives me the heebies just thinking about it

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

...It's almost like they're empathic or something... I don't know how to describe it...

Wheels really are the epitome of this with a bike too... and really, they are quite amazing pieces of engineering when you think about it.  A spoked bicycle wheel is basically a suspension bridge that anchors to itself... and when it's rolling and bearing weight, it actually carries the load by the top spokes, not the bottom ones, so the bike is actually hanging from the top of the rim instead of being held up by the bottom of it.  I built over 100 wheels in my day, and developed a reputation as a top notch wheel builder; I even ended up doing some wheel building for a handful of pro racers back then.  Those were the days... 

When it comes to wheels, there is definitely some sort of Karmic harmony to assembling one, something I never mastered...
Gives me the heebies just thinking about it(Image removed from quote.)

Yeah, wheels are one of those things that take a lot of practice to get good at...  I worked as a bike mechanic for more than 5 years and it took me at least a year of regular, 5 days a week wrenching and working on wheels to really get a good feel for them.  It's because of the suspension bridge thing... when you tighten or loosen just a single spoke, it affects the tension in every single other spoke in the wheel.

Spokes have particular load bearing and stress characteristics too, unlike just about anything else mechanical...  Spokes naturally twist when you tighten or loosen the spoke nipple, so you have to go through the whole wheel periodically and squeeze them in groups of two or four to release that wind up.  And when you do, it changes the amount of tension in each, and in the whole wheel again as a result. 

And like any other metal object, spokes fatigue with stress and age, they just do it in a much different way, because their loads are almost exclusively tensile instead of compressive or torsional.  If you have to replace a broken spoke, you're best off just detensioning the entire wheel, replacing the spoke, and then retensioning and retruing the entire thing.  And then, when you do, the new spoke stresses the wheel a lot differently than the old pre-fatigued spokes, so you have to take that into account too.

Yeah... fixing wheels can be a major brain-bender some times.  But it's like anything else, the more you do it, the better you get at it.  In fact, I earned the nickname of "witch doctor" for my wheel fixing skills when I was a mechanic and racer...

Oh, and by the by... sorry for totally derailing this thread...  But I love biking, and working on bikes, and wheels are one of those things that totally fascinate me because of that blend of science and voodoo they have...

[turnsouth]

In fact, I earned the nickname of "witch doctor" for my wheel fixing skills when I was a mechanic and racer...

It's a shame you wasted your life on a Doctorate, and a academic career...

I've only ever been a "shade tree" bike mechanic. But growing up, my best friend's dad was the town junk collector, so we were always knee deep in bikes that needed repair. If we weren't riding, we were fixing...

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

In fact, I earned the nickname of "witch doctor" for my wheel fixing skills when I was a mechanic and racer...

It's a shame you wasted your life on a Doctorate, and a academic career...

I've only ever been a "shade tree" bike mechanic. But growing up, my best friend's dad was the town junk collector, so we were always knee deep in bikes that needed repair. If we weren't riding, we were fixing...



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Oh, it wasn't a waste... it was preparation and background experience for all the research I've had to do in grad school and when I was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco...

In grad school, my advisor's lab got nicknamed "The Rube Goldberg Lab" because most of our experimental apparatuses looked like those contraptions of his...  All of my mechanical experience and the classes in wood shop and machine shop I took in high school (long before I knew I wanted to be a professor) ended up being good experience for building research apparatuses on the cheap.  While my advisor's doctorate was in psychology, his bachelor's degree was actually in engineering, and he taught me how to solder and make basic circuits to build things like button boxes for collecting responses, and how to wire them and other devices into an digital - analog converter for recording them directly into computer data files. 

It all was invaluable experience for me on my dissertation and for my post-doc, where I stuck needles in monkey's brains and recorded what their neurons were doing while we showed them pictures on the computer screen and made them push buttons and levers in response...  I never would have been able to do such cool mad-science stuff if I hadn't had all that machine shop, wood shop, and mechanical experience under my belt.  The hardest thing I ever had to do in grad school was learn to program in C.  That sucked!!!  I still hate programming to this day, but it's a necessary evil for doing research now days though.  Ugh.

Biking was a blissful and much needed form of relaxation to get away from the terrified shrieks of undergraduates, monkeys, research assistants, uh... forget I said that, to help me stay sane during 7 of the most arduous years of my life...

[turnsouth]

Oh, it wasn't a waste...

You know the wink meant that I was kidding, right? 

Very interesting points though. Somewhat akin to my experience, except that I stopped the college and kept on wrenching, something I have been doing since I could pick up a tool. Although I do still keep electronics as a hobby, it too is one of my lifelong passions, just something I realized that I didn't want to make a career out of.

My daughter is quite the opposite though, not mechanically inclined, but in the lab or classroom she is amazing. She's only had one year of college so far, but even as a freshman she scored a research assistant job (along side the grad students), and once she gets over her health issues she'll be back there. Her academic adviser says that by the time she is a senior that she'll have her own research grant. And to top it off, she is one of the best teachers I have ever seen. She even sat there in the hospital, helping one of her nurses through her organic chemistry homework that she had for one of her masters degree courses. Although, I think she does it all just to make the old man look lazy...

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

Oh, it wasn't a waste...

You know the wink meant that I was kidding, right? 

Very interesting points though. Somewhat akin to my experience, except that I stopped the college and kept on wrenching, something I have been doing since I could pick up a tool. Although I do still keep electronics as a hobby, it too is one of my lifelong passions, just something I realized that I didn't want to make a career out of.

My daughter is quite the opposite though, not mechanically inclined, but in the lab or classroom she is amazing. She's only had one year of college so far, but even as a freshman she scored a research assistant job (along side the grad students), and once she gets over her health issues she'll be back there. Her academic adviser says that by the time she is a senior that she'll have her own research grant. And to top it off, she is one of the best teachers I have ever seen. She even sat there in the hospital, helping one of her nurses through her organic chemistry homework that she had for one of her masters degree courses. Although, I think she does it all just to make the old man look lazy...

Yeah, no worries TS... I got it. 

Sounds great for your daughter!  Now days a good science education is invaluable in an economy where technical skills are some of the few areas where there is still some demand for jobs...  More than ever before now, the more education (or training as the case may be) that you have, the better your chances and the more opportunities you'll have.  She sounds like a bright young woman with a promising future!