I know; it’s not a common story.  Shop is supposed to be an easy A, and it was up until the very end, when Mr. Hancock sprung it on us that the school board was requiring him to assign a final written report that adhered to their guidelines.  He said he wasn’t going to be too strict, so we could pick any machine in history that did a job and do a report on it as long as we included the basics about what it did and why it was important and it was long enough.  I guess he figured there was no way anybody was going to pour over 40 papers from shop class, so there was no point in punishing us more than his hand was forced.

Unfortunately, I was sick the day he assigned topics, and all the easy ones, like the cotton gin, were taken.  He suggested I try out metal spinning machines.  He’d done refurbishing for a company that sold them while he was getting his teaching certification.  He said he knew it wasn’t that interesting, but he couldn’t think of anything practical, and if I got into a bind, at least he’d be able to help me out.

It was a drag, but Hancock was awful helpful about it.  He gave me some terms to look up- metal forming, multi spindle machine, multi spindle lathes, and a few others.  Nowadays, I could have just plugged those words into the Internet and written the report, but at the time, there was just the library.  I looked everywhere until the weekend before the report was due.  I didn’t like to get involved with teachers and get one-on-one help.  I thought it was for idiots.

When I didn’t find anything, though, I realized I had to pass this to graduate.  I went back to him for help.  It happened that there was a place one town over that sold multi spindle machines for a dealer, and one of Hancock’s old work buddies worked there.  He arranged for me to go over, talk to his friend and pick up some pamphlets.  It was easy from there.

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