My favorite new install kit

kgruber

kgruber

Final Approach
Joined
Jan 3, 2007
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Western Washington
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Skywag
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KPWT Bremerton National
1st place will always go to 'Micro Aerodynamics" vortex generator kits. They have EVERYthing you need to install, including a sharpened pencil.

But in the running is the "Ring" security doorbell that I am installing. I get a break right now as the battery is charging. But they have the drill bit, the Philips screwdriver, wire extensions for short wiring.............probably more.........because of the break.

And they are funny too. It says if you don't need this part, just stick it in the drawer of stuff "you never use!"
 
kgruber said:
1st place will always go to 'Micro Aerodynamics" vortex generator kits. They have EVERYthing you need to install, including a sharpened pencil.
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IIRC, the Christen Eagle kits included razor blades taped to the outside so you could open the package, but not pencils.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
Well that took a wildly untrue turn.
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None of the young engineers that I work with have changed the oil in their car. Or know what a ratchet wrench is.
My impression is that most of them went into engineering because they were good with math and they thought It would make a good living, Without having to pay for grad school. But they are a wizz with Powerpoint.
 
denverpilot said:
Plus you’re not that young anymore! .
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Oof. I'm the youngest of millenials. The oldest millenials are in their 40's now :o. I can't wait to start crapping on post-millienials. "When I was growing up we actually had lightbulbs that burned out!"


Morgan3820 said:
None of the young engineers that I work with have changed the oil in their car. Or know what a ratchet wrench is.
My impression is that most of them went into engineering because they were good with math and they thought It would make a good living, Without having to pay for grad school. But they are a wizz with Powerpoint.
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Then you hire ****ty engineers or they went to a school that didn't prioritize the correct things.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
Oof. I'm the youngest of millenials. The oldest millenials are in their 40's now :eek:. I can't wait to start crapping on post-millienials. "When I was growing up we actually had lightbulbs that burned out!"
[snip]
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Instead of having to replace the entire light fixture! The LED fixtures do last a good while, but they are not forever. :(
 
denverpilot said:
You’re not the norm. Sorry. LOL.

Plus you’re not that young anymore! LOL LOL LOL. You have toys to maintain! Hahaha.
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It is amazing how boomers get to just keep making these derogatory and un-true statements about young people. Guess it is just their minds that are finally going..... so sad.

BTW from the avatar picture, it looks like the OP was a boomer that bought the product which contained all the items required for installation. I don't see any "young people" boasting about products that contain installation tools. Maybe you have your "facts" backwards.
 
Matthew Rogers said:
It is amazing how boomers get to just keep making these derogatory and un-true statements about young people. Guess it is just their minds that are finally going..... so sad.
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If you’re so worried about facts you might start with finding out if I’m a Boomer, LOL. Bzzzzt. Wrong. Thanks for playing! Haha.

The statement is a simple observation. I’ve helped a lot of people fix things, especially electronics. Finding someone with the proper tools is exceedingly rare.

Be careful which person you are addressing though, note I said young people, and someone ELSE said “Millennials”.

Millennials aren’t young anymore.

Nice tool kits are almost always enjoyed as wedding and housewarming gifts.

Never seen anyone take those back.

Recently gave away a tile saw, a chop saw, a small compressor, and a few other things to a young man we knew with a new home who wanted to start renovating a bathroom. I had multiple. He said he’d been wanting them for years.

It’s just normal. People starting out typically don’t have tools beyond a few screwdrivers and such. I’ve given many young people their first socket sets as gifts.

Most grew up in households that don’t work on their own vehicles.

Pilots heavily lean toward the self selecting “mechanically inclined” group. The genpop doesn’t typically buy tools unless they have a hobby that needs them or a project they don’t want to pay for.

Some just were never shown how easy some jobs are.

I can name two co-workers with engineering degrees that don’t have a toolbox in the garages. They get excited about buying the junk from iFixit to open a MacBook.

They’re literally the huge mass of people who don’t care about Right to Repair because they’ll never do it.

Also again, carefully note my words. I said “most”. 51% is “most”. With population distributions being what they are with urbanization, the statement is easily accurate. I’ve worked and lived as a working member of the staff at a homeless shelter.

Ain’t nobody in the inner city dragging around their SnapOn collection. LOL.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
Oof. I'm the youngest of millenials. The oldest millenials are in their 40's now :o. I can't wait to start crapping on post-millienials.
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LOL. Y’all are slacking. You haven’t come up with their nickname yet! LOL.

But yeah. Y’all have teenage kids now in many cases. And airplanes. Ha. Definitely not in my “young people” category anymore. Not for like ten years now. Hahaha.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
"PowerPoint engineers" have been around longer than PowerPoint.
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Death by PowerPoint has to be the first thing they teach in Management 101 these days....We get those stupid presentations pretty often and it's hilarious when you get a video in one, of a guy standing there while a video is played on the screen next to him, and the bonehead that put the presentation together forgot to insert the video from the original that we are supposed to see! 9 minutes of a guy standing there watching a video, with only the audio from the room mikes.

In my 8 years of engineering job time, I made a whopping 2 entire slides for a PowerPoint presentation. Took two, because I couldn't use a small enough font to get it on one page and still be reasonably readable. Fortunately for me, after that one presentation, my data got reduced to a line stating: "See the current CDRL for Instrumentation procurement status".
 
Morgan3820 said:
None of the young engineers that I work with have changed the oil in their car. Or know what a ratchet wrench is.
My impression is that most of them went into engineering because they were good with math and they thought It would make a good living, Without having to pay for grad school. But they are a wizz with Powerpoint.
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This is a bit of a stereotype. I am a Mech Eng, graduated in the 1970s. There were 4 or 5 of us in my class that were serious petrol-heads/hot-rodders and spent much time modifying, competing, breaking and desperately fixing our sports cars so we could make it to class on Monday morning. Pretty well everyone else in the class would have been hard pressed to know how to change a spark plug, much less repair anything. There's a long standing fallacy that somehow all engineering students and PEs should automatically be capable auto mechanics. That's never been the case from my experience.

And most professional engineers I know are far, far better whizzes with spreadsheets than they are with PowerPoint. Slide presentations are a necessary evil for dog & pony shows in large corporations when you need to beg for money for your project. Most engineers are not well equipped or articulate enough to do that...and everyone knows that P.E. stands for Poor English. :D

aftCG said:
It also came with a bandaid in case you cut yourself with the razor.
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Good thing all the blood stains on the spars and ribs got covered up with Ceconite...
 
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GRG55 said:
We'll have to work on The @Ted to lead the way on that. He's half way there. :D
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Bah, I’ve owned 8 Jaguars and owned 1 airplane (although Cloud Nine owned another 3 which people generally give me credit for owning). I’ve owned 2 of the Jaguars over the course of airplane ownership.

Pretty sure I win most awards for “most broken machines”.
 
I grew up on a wheat farm -cattle ranch in KS. Dad had a set of tools from when he worked the line at Cessna and the flight line at Boeing, both in Wichita, KS. He kept those tools in a big tool box away from our clumsy little hands, but there was a set of tools he wasn’t afraid of us using. We wrenched on a lot of farm machinery and occasionally he’d break out the good tools. I changed a few oil filters, too.

My first job out of college was as an FAA field engineer. They supplied us with a lot of tools needed for running wires and cables, and attaching connectors to cables. Not much in the way of wrenches.

O got a long list of tools to acquire for A&P school. I had the open end-box end wrenches (Craftsman not Snap-On nor Marco) but needed socket sets, etc. I lost a lot of those tools when we were rear-ended by an 18 wheeler in AZ. We were lucky that’s all we lost. Subsequently, I’ve accumulated almost everything I lost. I have a Craftsman wrench set from about 1/4” to about 3”. I don’t do a lot of wrenching anymore, but when I do it is really nice to have right tool for the job. And I own neither an airplane nor a Jaguar! (Isn’t there an airplane called Jaguar? If so, you could have both with one vehicle!)
 
Ted said:
Bah, I’ve owned 8 Jaguars :eek: and owned 1 airplane (although Cloud Nine owned another 3 which people generally give me credit for owning). I’ve owned 2 of the Jaguars over the course of airplane ownership.

Pretty sure I win most awards for “most broken machines”.
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And also that other coveted trophy: "Most Perseverance in the Face of Self Inflicted Adversity"
 
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GRG55 said:
There's two ways youngsters can deal with that...buy an airplane, or buy a Jaguar. If you didn't have a good set of tools when you started, you will by the time you're done. ;)
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We had one of each not long ago. The airplane is still here. :)
 
I had a friend in high school that had a supercharged bug-eye Sprite. He tuned it EVERY morning.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Yeah, my daughter just "borrows" mine and I end up buying replacements.
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We gave both of our kids tool kits for Christmas one year. Our daughter was known as the "Al Borland" of her sorority because of her ability to fix things.

Mtns2Skies said:
Then you hire ****ty engineers or they went to a school that didn't prioritize the correct things.
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I remember back in the 80s running into an engineer to went to one of those schools. I got my BSEE from Washington State University and they practically beat that practical stuff into our heads. This engineer, who went to Cal Poly SLO, installed a large system in our RF semi-anechoic chamber for EMC testing and I told him to hook up the power and we'd get going. He said that he didn't understand three phase power and I asked what they taught him in that fancy school. I could to it in my sleep. Of course, I had a coop job working for the contractor building Lower Granite Lock and Dam on the Snake River, so I really had 3 phase beat into my head.

kgruber said:
I had a friend in high school that had a supercharged bug-eye Sprite. He tuned it EVERY morning.
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I had a 1976 MG Midget for a year in the early 1980s when I went to work for Tandem Computers. You didn't walk up to that car without a wrench or screwdriver in your hand. There was a shop in Santa Clara that specialized in restoring old MGs and they had a bumper sticker that I should have bought that expressed the whole thing rather well. "I'll have you know that the parts falling off this car are of the highest British quality!"
 
Ghery said:
...I got my BSEE from Washington State University and they practically beat that practical stuff into our heads...
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I think those of us fortunate to grow up and go to college in resource development regions, such as the PNW, might have perhaps got more of that than the brainy MIT and CalPoly types. ;)

I was on a visit to WWU in Bellingham in the late 1970s and the engineering department there had built a custom bodied car with a Mazda rotary engine that they were working to break the class speed record on the Bonneville salt flats. It was a multi-department engineering student program, including using their wind tunnel and Mechanical Engineering machine shop. Really interesting program run over several years as the students would organize a trip once a year to race the car and then spend the intervening time tweaking and testing to do it all again the next year. Very hands on, data driven and systematic, and they were getting close to the record when I visited.

That's the sort of thing that can really help students that have the aptitude to work with tools.

But I also know some damn fine engineers (a lot better than me!) that couldn't change a light bulb without electrocuting themselves.
 
@kgruber - Did you leave them a tip?

[You may never hear the end of 'negative tip', lest you go back to your other thread and explain. 'cause inquiring minds want to know]
 
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The Three Rules of Tools

1. Always use the right tool for the job.
2. A hammer is always the right tool.
3. Anything can be a hammer.
 
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