Birdie: The Pattern Maker is a craftsman that wears many hats, firstly he is an expert wood worker working in all three dimensions plus upside down and inside out and backwards. He is also something of a metallurgist, a draftsman a machinist and an engineer plus an expert in plaster and plastics. It's not for nothing that the apprenticeship to become a ticketed pattern maker takes seven years.Quote:
Originally Posted by Birdie
It's somewhat laughable to think that there are those that google wikepidia or read some book and then think that they know whereof they speak.
When the second world war ended there was a large influx of European crafts men that immigrated to Canada. My father hired nine pattern makers who had come from Germany. These men had worked for the Krupp Steel Works during the war. Now you may not know what the Krupp steel works was but suffice it to say that Krupp produced the German War Machine and virtually all machines in it. I have been there and the shear size of the place is simply beyond description.
I started working in my fathers shop when I was about ten or so cleaning up and painting patterns after school and during summer holidays, when I got older with the tutelage of these men I soon graduated to doing real work.
You speak of the older generation, well let me tell you, I listened to these men when they would talk about the patterns that they had helped build, like the turrets for the Panzers and Kings Tigers, the great railroad guns and even one had worked on the patterns for the massive deck guns of the Bismark and the Tirpitz . Comparatively everything that we produced paled into
insignificance.
These were the true masters of this most exalted craft and I listened to every word and they taught me much.
The last of these men passed away five years ago at the age of 102 years, I miss them all and their knowledge.
You are right insofar as the best is all but gone and we have lived in the of all possible times. Sad that it has to end this way, with a whimper and not with a bang.
