Wednesday, I started the Shamrock project. It's a stack up project (aluminum, cfrp, aluminum) with various drilling and safety wire to finish it off. I got frustrated at the beginning cuz I couldn't draw my layout. Needless to say, I was again in last place when the day ended. Confidence level dropped even further.

Thursday, I started the Drilling & Countersinking project. I got thru a bit of it, but couldn't finish in 8 hours. I already had 2 other projects unfinished so you can prolly guess how I was feeling that nite. Yup, confidence was even lower by the time I went home. Of course, I'm thinking, "just put me back in the cargo bay where I don't drill or safety wire or seal..."

Friday rolled around and because the Drilling/Countersinking is alotted for 1.5 days, I got it done. May have been the people I was around too. Different energy, we were all closer to being in the same place, etc. I got the D/C project done and was able to put in some work on the Shamrock before lunch. With the Shamrock, I got a lot done so that last thing to do next week is the safety wire (and of course, to take it apart). That boosted my self-esteem quite a bit right there. (One of the steps to buy off was to correctly torque a bunch of bolts in front of an instructor. When I took the torque class, I was a bit heavy on the torque. When I did it on the project (weeks later), it went really well. May have over-torqued 1 or 2.

After lunch, Mike and I were hoping to finish up the Shamrock (we teamed up so we could get stuff down faster. We'd grab fasteners for each other, set up huck pullers, cherry pullers, etc) but alas, tis not to be. Cuz the other side of the class, when they did it, they had to do 2 other projects after the C/D. We were hoping the instructors would forget and let us finish the other stuff. Nope. HAHAHAHAHA.

The next project Mike and I were put was 90 degree drilling. This is where you use a 90 degree drill motor (as opposed to a classic pistol grip). We set up everything we needed beforehand so we could blow through it. The instructor recorded us at about 1.5 hrs or something, but cuz they round to the quarter hour, we did it in under an hour. Easy project, even with all the stepping up we had to do.

Project 2 for the last half of the shift was gun barrel drilling. There's no stepping up. Just blast right through. And that's what Mike and I did. Blast right through it to get it done. Again, we had everything set up and laid out. Because we had 3 drill kits between us, we set up like this.
-500 rpm pistol : 190 (that's .190" drill bit)
-500 rpm pistol : 250
-90 degree : 190
-xxxxx (had to switch out the last drill bit cuz we didn't have an extra gun.

The drill guides were ready to go and we made sure we were drilling the correct rows and BAM, we were done. :D

Those easier, smaller projects worked wonder for me. I felt a lot better (even good) coming out. I'm not the only one who was starting to get bummed out about stuff. Some say I'm a bit hard on myself but it's like, I know how to do this, I just can't get it thru to my hands to do the work well/right. Anyway...