Fiona's Letters TAFE Motor Mechanic Training Course for Girls Week Four Hi Everyone! Well, I should have known that any industry that was male dominated HAD to involve sex. Derr! It's not just the oh-so-tasteful calendars of scantily-clad women gracing the mechanical workshops around the globe; the subtle (NOT!) use of sexual innuendo used to sell everything from vehicles to car seat covers (I could never understand why they insist on spoiling a perfectly good bike ad by sticking some panting tart in the way!) or the mere fact that anything with a motor and wheels is referred to as 'she' - it's far worse than that! Ask me to describe the sequence of events in any basic 2 or 4 stroke motor and the answer will be, 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow'. Someone's idea of a good night out perhaps - actually more than just some, I suspect - but it's the way mechanics remember the cycle when the correct terms are intake, compression, ignition and exhaust. They don't sound nearly as exciting as 'suck, squeeze, bang, blow', do they? Then we get onto lubrication, stroking, heads, rods, boring, shafts, throats, skirts, heat, plugs, rings - don't even ask me about grease nipples!! It's all too much! No wonder so many mechanics smoke when they leave the workshop and, typically, they don't stay and hold the engine afterwards to bask in the afterglow. For women it's food and sex, for the guys it's wheels and sex - totally in awe of their own inventions. If you know of any male mechanics out there who would rather go for an afternoon at the Korean Bathhouse for a body scrub and facial than watch car races on the TV all day, please let me know - I think he should be featured on "60 Minutes". In case you were wondering, yes, we did learn more this week. We're slowly starting to get more hands-on experience (OK - you can forget about the sex stuff now, that's been dealt with!!) and have been promised more of it - hooray!! We each got a simple (?) Stromberg carburettor to dismantle and reassemble on Friday. Some serious lateral thinking went into devising those things. So far, I'm still the quickest at reassembling - it's just a matter of reversing the dismantling process and you're done. However, I know it's early days yet and the harder stuff is still to come. Started getting some more information on the diesel engines this week, also, and I would like to know more about this side of things in the weeks to come. Numbers are still low - we only had 5 of us on Friday! We will be getting some publicity soon through NRMA but I have been toying with the idea of perhaps contacting the local papers and seeing if they would be interested in running a story. There's a lot of girls who would jump at doing something like this but the course is not well advertised. The catch is: if attendance numbers are low then funding for the course will be cut and the course will cease to be. If anyone has any suggestions for raising the profile of this course, all ideas are welcome. OK, gotta go and get my books together for tomorrow - hope you all have a good one and I'll catch you again next week! Cheers! Fi xx ;) Go to first page - Index - Next page

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