Ah, the gentle art of mechanics. It should be a qualification for certification for every
mechanical engineer to disassemble an engine...
Something like that might have been the case in the old days, when there was more
stress on the practical, rather than abstracting the whole process off into some cad
package or other. Not that i'm against cad, just the oppposite, but how do trainee
engineers get the practical experience these days ?. Working with hand and machine
tools should be part of the process and there's nothing like hands on working with
metal to get an instinctive understanding of it's characteristics and limits. You can't
get that from cad packages and "design rule sets" are by nature generic and not
necessarily optimum...
If you are similar age, then our generation cut our teeth on motorcycles, often fixing
by the roadside, before somehow getting cheap mot failure cars fixed and through
the mot. So many people these days seem so completely devoid of clue w/respect
to anything mechanical and would rather pay garages 50-100 ukp / hour, for the
most trivial of faults.
Starting to sound like grumpy old sod, but what happened to scientific curiosity,
the right stuff and pursuit of excellence for it's own sake ?. Just one more pointer to
the general decline and fall of Western civilisation
...