how do you do it

After I got out of the service (age 23, married with two young kids) I took jobs here and there but had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. I had one job where I had to sweep the floors in a large (humungous) machine shop. Everyday I would sweep and watch the machinist turning metal on their lathes and cutting and shaping. It really looked like a lot of fun, creating things out of raw metal. I was so fascinated by the machinist and their skills I used the GI bill to go to machine shop school. Next door to the machine shop (at school) was the welding shop. During the machine shop school breaks I would go over to hang out with the welders and had them teach me how to weld. So by the time I graduated from machine shop school I had become a pretty good welder. After just 8 months in machine shop school (I'm a fast learner) I was hired by a machine shop. I worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and went to school from 6PM to midnight for 4 years. Once I graduated from machine shop school I worked 100 hours a week doing machine work and programming CNC machines. This was back in the late 70s and I was making 55K a year. That was a lot of money back then. If you can do machine work and if you can weld you can make almost anything. You can draw your own blueprints then make the part that you drew...THAT'S COOL!!! You can harden metal, you can anneal metal, you can heat it and change it's shape. You learn how to see the actual part inside the metal block before you make the first cut. I made a lot of money, especially after I learned how to program the CNC machines. It paid real good and was a lot of fun. I never got tired of taking a raw piece of metal and making something out of it...the more complicated the better!!! I'm retired now but I still make things out of metal all the time or help someone else modify their hot rod.
If it wasn't for these skills I wouldn't be able to build hot rods or modify them. I believe that I can do anything and build anything (it may not be true but I know that there's nothing I haven't been able to do)!!!
My point is.......when you see something that looks interesting (really interesting) GO FOR IT!!! The worst that will happen is that you'll learn something in the process and maybe, just maybe, it will pay you back for the rest of your life!!!


Treblig