Well darn, a week before the new month. And it seems as if I haven’t aged a day.
My mentorship has been going very well as the month slowly comes to an end. I’ve unfortunately have met him only once since my last blog post, but I have had a very informative lesson. The last lesson I had, I was taught how to change the spark plugs of the engine. Although this may seem easy to some people, I found this like challenging as there were many things to follow as the lesson progressed. The main thing to keep in mind when changing the spark plugs-and anything in general when working with engines-is that keep track of where everything goes and attaches to. Each spark plug has a specific connector which distributes the sparks to each spark plug, where the engine receives it and starts. This piece of the engine is essential to starting the vehicle. It takes specific spark plug ratchets to remove and replace the plugs, and removing the actual spark plug connectors took a bit of broad force. He also took a few minutes to show what is the actual components of the inside of a car. Overall, although I found myself scrambling to find which connector connects to which spark plug, it was a good day.
It was a very good mentoring session, but I found the easy transition from one part of his lesson to another and the examples he used to relate to the engine to be something well that happened during the mentoring. The fact that he uses examples to find connections with what he’s talking about made it particularly easier to follow and comprehend. If he didn’t compare everyday things with vehicles, such as gears on a bike with gears on a car, it would be much harder to follow.
However, the lesson wasn’t the easiest thing I have ever experienced because I’m still at that stage where it’s a tad awkward between my mentor and myself. We felt that we were effectively communicating with each other as we both got answers we wanted and asked questions for reassurance or for curiosity. Although my knowledge of engines are limited, I tried to be as honest as I can with what I knew and was open to anything he taught me, even though it might have been against what I already knew before. I feel that we were really paying attention to each other as the session progressed because it got a bit easier to talk to him, even though we haven’t known each other for too long. I can safely say that we both paid attention to each other, because I did what ever he asked me to do while he kept my strengths and weaknesses in learning in mind, as he knew I would learn better more from hands-on demonstrations than on paper.
A learning challenge I found while learning how to change spark plug and even when I first got introduced to the engine was that I had difficulties remembering all the parts and possibly steps of an engine. Engine work takes a lot of memorizing which I am not fully use to at the moment, so for the time being, I must constantly review and test myself to make sure I can remember the parts and their specific tasks of an engine. I possibly might purchase a few books or check a few websites on the parts of an engine just to constantly have the parts circling in my head.
Thank you very much for following along, and I am quite excited to see what I will learn yet. I want to learn how to build my own engine, but I probably won’t get to that point for a long time.