I agree with Shipchief though when faced with the idea of hand fitting. I have never done it. In a marine work environment for example, we typically have a small number of people getting a lot of work done. There is no time to do things this way and therefore to even cultivate such skills. Precision sub-assemblies and routine replacement of them is the order of the day.
Y' know, sometimes things in real life happen that cause you to look at a few things fresh, that's happening right now with me, so anyway, I posted that, read shipchiefs reply and thought "oh no, two peoples separated by a common language, hope it doesn't come across like a self appointed expert preaching" and then this morning read the rest of the replies.
I guess I was really lucky, I learned most of this stuff because the people who taught me weren't just a generation older, they really were old farts, but knew their stuff, for example the guy who taught be hydraulics after I'd learned the basics helped to design the gun stabilisation systems for battleships (he once told me that the most important thing he could tell me was "you can say anything you like to your boss, as long as you're not right, that's the one sin he won't forgive") and so on, so my apprenticeship was very old fashioned even when I was getting it.
Looking back I realise that due to things like war shortages (both wars) and generally being in bum fuck nowhere these guys had plenty of real experience where the "it's broken, get a new one from stores" attitude meant you stayed put, marooned... shit just HAD to be fixable, on site, without any fancy factory tools, if it wasn't then maybe you died as a result.
Looking back I also realised that I picked up the attitude that machinery has to degrade gradually with plenty of warning, not do what modern stuff does and throw a hissy fit and die 20 seconds later leaving you there going what the....
I'm realising, looking at myself, that as much as I cursed the job while doing it (I quit when the bottom finally dropped out of it about 15 years ago and PR bunnies could earn more than me) the thing I didn't realise was part of the deal with gaining all this knowledge and experience is you get to pass it on, and apprenticeships have long since disappeared now, so basically most of this stuff is going to die with me, and I think that causes some subconcious pressure in me to get on here and bang on about something or other.
I've moaned elsewhere in the past that book learning (engineering) by itself is a pure waste of time, and that when these skills are gone, they are gone... two examples.
A major iron / steel foundry . smelt in the midlands of the UK, about 15/20 years ago, there was this guy who'se job it was do decide when to pour the melt into the ingots, and as many of you will know the more precisely you can do this at the right temperature, the better the quality of the product, and this guy had been doing it for 20 years.
So, they come along with mergers and acquisitions and so on, and management invests bloody millions of pounds in computerising this process, and the day they turn the system on is the day they sack this guy.
Well they have problems, the quality of the pour is way below what this guy was achieving, and worse still it varied from pour to pour, so they got the technicians who designed this kit back in and you can imagine the pressure everyone was under, after about three weeks (and money lost hand over fist on every pour) they have improved matters somewhat, and made QC less variable, but it still isn't as good as when matey did it.
So someone decides to call matey back in and ask him how he did it, it cost a wedge but he agreed, now Sheffield wasn't just a steel town, it was also a glass town, and just down the road from the steel mill there was a glass maker, and this glass maker used to make a certain sort of blue glass, and our steel fella used to look at the melt through a rod of this blue glass held in his fist, so to anyone else it looks like he is squinting through his hand to shield his eyes, and the instant the visible colour changed he poured.
Next story is old clive, he used to work the propeller shaft lathe, had done since he was an apprentice on that same lathe when it was new, now he's something in his sixties, new management have taken over and decide to sack all the old duffers before they get too many years in to save the pension scheme bills, so they sack old clive, but what nobody realises is that as that lathe has worn over 40 years, old clive got better and better, and when they sacked him nobody could get good enough work out of the lathe, so they spent nearly 6 million on a new one, meanwhile the polish shipyards had poached the work anyway and the first of many successive liquidations and buyouts started, each of which leaving a smaller and smaller number of staff, meanwhile "the hulk" which was an 70 or 80 foot wooden hull built by the apprentices back in the day still languished opposite, despite 40 years of weathering and numerous attempts to burn it out, it continues to outlive the dock where it was made.
so, that's the problem, there isn't anywhere to go to learn this stuff any more, if you're lucky you can come somewhere like this where there are a few people who have done it, maybe one of them lives close enough to show you, but if not they can talk you through it and you can learn it by trial and error, because if you don't it will be gone forever, and then you'll be where those old noys who taught me were, where shit just HAD to be fixable, on site, without any fancy factory tools, if it wasn't then maybe you died as a result.
we aren't going to get a torpedo up our ass because our shit doesn't work, but lack of potable water will kill you just as surely, or perhaps lack of power for the radio transmitter or computer and packet radio, or lack of properly cooked food, or lack of the power to turn a lathe or spark a welding rod.
tell you what we do have now that apprentices of old did not, digital cameras, movie and still, and a global instant and essentially free communications medium, if hotater knows a wrinkle I don't he might as well be next door to me, because he can photograph that sucker and take dimensions and sit at the keyboard and bash out a "How to fo it to it"
but the bottom line is we all have to have the basics off pat, a bearing is a bearing is a bearing, and an (lube) oil film is an oil film is an oil film, and when you scale that bearing by a factor of four you don't scale the oil film, it don't work that way, and "clean enough to eat off" isn't clean enough for a lube oil system, and the only thing that is "good enough" is the best you can reasonably make it.
emerals said something about a 70 year old genuine 6/1 that requires a minimal service, pay up front and cry once, he's right, but you can pay in work and attention to detail too, it's like the barter system with your motor, throw money or throw labour at it, then you get something that will work YOU into the ground, even if you're only 25 now, and THAT is priceless.
the skills you'll learn from your listeroids will never be obsolete or useless or inapplicable, the mastery you achieve over machinery and more importantly supply chains of spares will never be obsolete, and it will never be worth less than it is today in this age of "just in time" shipments and built in redundancy and "it's buggered, get a new one from stores"
hey, here's a business plan for you.
India is real cheap, you can fly there for a month and have change out of what it would cost you to live that month in the west.
So fly to india, get your very own listeroid, and spend a month hands on apprenticeship style building your very own listeroid so it is as good as a genuine lister, then go back home with skills and and engine that will both last more than a human lifetime if you pass them on.