My Week in the Mechanical Workshop

Monday morning started different from every other week I’d had so far. The workshop was buzzing, but not with the usual sound of grinding or the sharp screech of the power hacksaw. Instead, a group of senior students and two technicians were gathered around a skeletal frame that looked like the bones of a small car. My supervisor, Mr. Adebayo, waved me over. “You’re joining the EV team today,” he said. “We’re assisting in the creation and production of an electric vehicle prototype.” I had only ever seen electric vehicles in pictures and on YouTube videos. Now I was standing in front of one, or at least what would become one.

The first thing I learned was that an EV build is all about precision. Unlike the diesel engines we stripped down last semester, there were no pistons or crankshafts here. It was a frame, a battery box, and a maze of orange cables that everyone treated like they were dangerous snakes. My first job was simple: hold components steady while the technicians mounted the electric motor to the rear subframe. The motor was smaller than I expected, but heavy. We used a small gantry crane to lower it in, and I was in charge of guiding the bolts into place. Mr. Adebayo explained that alignment was critical because any offset would cause vibration and noise later. Once the motor was in, we moved to the battery pack. It was a sealed metal box with warning stickers all over it. “High voltage,” one read. “Isolation procedures,” read another. Before anyone touched it, the lead technician used a multimeter and a lock-out tag to prove the system was de-energized. That stuck with me. In welding, we worry about burns and arc eye. With EVs, a mistake could be fatal instantly. We spent the rest of the day routing low-voltage wiring for the lights, dashboard, and controller. I wasn’t allowed to crimp the high-voltage cables, but I watched closely as the technician explained why EV wires are orange and why every connector has an interlock system. By closing time, my hands were dirty with grease and my notebook was full of new terms: BMS, inverter, regenerative braking. I left the workshop with the smell of new rubber and wiring insulation in my nose, and the realization that mechanical engineering was changing fast.

Tuesday felt like going back to school, but in a good way. After the excitement of the EV project, Mr. Adebayo said it was time to strengthen our theory. “You can’t run a proper weld if you don’t understand your electrode,” he said, tapping the blackboard. For the next three hours, we had a detailed lecture on welding electrode classification. He drew a sample code on the board: E6013. Then he broke it down piece by piece. The “E” stands for electrode, which means it’s used for arc welding. The “60” means the weld metal will have a tensile strength of 60,000 pounds per square inch. That number alone made me look at the thin 3.2 mm rod in my hand differently. The “1” was the most important for us as students. It meant all-position. Flat, horizontal, vertical, overhead – this rod could do them all. The last digit, “3”, told us about the flux coating. E6013 has a rutile-potassium coating that makes the arc soft, stable, and easy to restart. It works on both AC and DC, which is why almost every small workshop in Lagos has a box of it lying around.

Then he introduced its older, stronger brother: E7018. Again, we broke it down. “E” for electrode. “70” for 70,000 psi tensile strength. “1” again for all-position. But the “8” was where things got serious. It meant low-hydrogen, iron powder coating, and it needed DC+ or AC. Mr. Adebayo passed around two used stubs. The E6013 stub was covered in a light, flaky slag that came off easily. The E7018 stub had a thick, hard slag that needed a chipping hammer. He explained that E7018 is used for structural jobs, pressure vessels, and anything that cannot afford hydrogen cracking. But it comes with rules: the rods must be kept in an oven at 300°C because they absorb moisture from the air. If you weld with a damp E7018 rod, you put hydrogen into the weld and risk cracks days later. We spent the afternoon comparing the two. We ran beads with E6013 on some scrap plate. The arc was smooth, almost like drawing with a pencil. The slag peeled off in long ribbons. Then we tried E7018. The arc was more forceful, more digging. The weld pool was fluid, and the slag was thicker. When we chipped it off, the weld underneath was dense and fine-grained. I understood then why you wouldn’t use E7018 to patch a farm gate, and why you wouldn’t trust E6013 to hold up a bridge beam. We ended the day by memorizing the codes and their uses. I wrote in my log book that E6013 is for general fabrication, light to medium steel, and E7018 is for critical, strong joints. My hands smelled like burnt flux, but my head was clear on electrodes for the first time.

Wednesday was the day everything from Tuesday started to make physical sense. “Theory is good,” Mr. Adebayo said as he set up three T-joint samples on the welding table. “But gravity doesn’t read textbooks.” Today was about welding positions. He chalked 1F on the first sample. “Flat position fillet weld,” he said. “The easiest. Your plate is flat, and you’re welding on top. Gravity keeps the pool where you want it.” He demonstrated. The electrode was at about 45 degrees to the joint, with a slight drag angle. He moved steadily, and the weld built up like a perfect triangle of metal. My turn came and it felt almost too easy after all the stories about welding being hard. The bead was a little wide, but it was straight.

He moved the second sample to the side of the table and clamped it so the joint was running horizontally. “2F,” he wrote. “Horizontal position fillet weld. Now gravity is your enemy.” He showed us how to adjust. The electrode angle changed. Instead of pointing straight into the joint, he tilted it upward slightly to fight the sag. He also used a slight weave, pausing at the top of the joint to let the metal fill in and prevent undercut. When I tried, my first bead sagged. The bottom was thick and the top had a sharp groove – undercut. Mr. Adebayo didn’t shout. He just pointed. “Gravity won that round. More tilt, less amperage, and pause at the top.” My second try was better.

The third sample went into the vice vertically. “3F. Vertical position fillet weld.” He explained we had two choices: vertical-up or vertical-down. “Up is stronger, down is faster but risky on thick plate.” He chose vertical-up. The technique was completely different. No more dragging. He used a slight side-to-side motion, or a Christmas-tree pattern, pausing at the sides and moving quickly across the middle. The goal was to let the metal freeze before it could drip. Watching the pool was like watching honey. If you moved too slow, it would bulge and drop. If you moved too fast, you’d get no fusion. When I tried, I got about two inches before a lump of metal dropped onto my glove. I learned fast that 3F demands respect. By the end of the day my arms were tired from holding the stinger at odd angles, and my sleeves had a few new burn marks. But I could now look at a joint and immediately know if it was 1F, 2F, or 3F, and I knew which one would fight me. Mr. Adebayo’s final note was simple: “E6013 can do all of these because of the 1 in its name. But your skill decides if the weld is good.”

Thursday morning, I walked into the workshop and saw a pile of angle iron cut to different lengths and a sketch on the wall. “No new theory today,” Mr. Adebayo said. “Today we build.” We were going to fabricate a storage rack where all the cut metals from our jobs would be kept. For weeks, the offcuts and student projects had been leaning against walls or piled in corners. It was messy and dangerous. The rack would fix that. The job forced us to use everything from the last three days. First was measuring and marking out. We used a tape, a try square, and a scriber to mark the angle iron for the uprights, shelves, and braces. I remembered Monday’s lesson on precision. If the legs weren’t equal, the rack would wobble. If the shelves weren’t square, the metal would slide off.

Then came cutting. I was back on the power hacksaw, but this time I wasn’t just practicing. Every cut had to be right because we didn’t have extra material. I measured twice, clamped tight, and cut. After each cut, we checked it with the square. Next was assembly. We laid the pieces on the welding table and used magnetic clamps to hold the first rectangular frame for the base. Mr. Adebayo watched but didn’t touch. “Tack it,” he said. Tack welding was new. You don’t run a full bead yet. You just put small welds at the corners to hold everything together. If it’s wrong, you can break the tacks and fix it. We tacked the base, checked for square by measuring corner to corner, and then tacked the uprights. This was where Wednesday’s lessons paid off. The base welds were 1F – flat position, easy. But welding the uprights to the base meant we were working in 2F – horizontal. I remembered to tilt the electrode up and pause at the top. My tacks held.

Once everything was tacked and squared, we did the final welding. I was assigned one of the lower shelf frames. I ran 1F fillet welds along the top, flipping the frame as needed to keep everything flat. When I had to weld a vertical joint on the leg, I switched to 3F vertical-up. It was slow, and my bead wasn’t perfect, but it had fusion and no undercut. By afternoon, the rack stood on its own. It was six feet long, four feet high, with three shelves. We added diagonal braces for strength. Mr. Adebayo pushed against it. It didn’t move. “This is why we learn positions,” he said. “Because real work is never all flat.” We ended the day by moving all the scattered metal pieces onto the new rack. The workshop immediately looked bigger and safer. I wrote in my notes that material storage isn’t just housekeeping. It prevents rust, prevents accidents, and saves time. You don’t want to spend 10 minutes looking for a piece of flat bar when you could be welding.

Friday was quieter. The rack was done, but the workshop still needed stock for next week’s jobs. My task was simple: continuation of metal cutting. But after Thursday, it didn’t feel like a beginner job anymore. I had a cut list from Mr. Adebayo: ten pieces of 25mm angle iron at 600mm long, eight pieces of flat bar at 300mm, and six pieces of 20mm square pipe at 450mm. Accuracy was the priority. “We wasted two lengths last week,” he said. “Today, zero waste.” I set up the power hacksaw and the abrasive cutoff saw. For the angle iron, the power hacksaw was better – slower but straighter. For the flat bar and square pipe, the abrasive saw was faster.

I fell into a rhythm: measure, mark, clamp, cut, deburr, stack. Measure, mark, clamp, cut, deburr, stack. With each piece, I checked it against the first one to make sure they were identical. I used a file to remove the burrs so nobody would slice a hand later. Halfway through, Mr. Adebayo checked my work. He took a piece of angle iron and placed it against his try square. He nodded. “Good. But your feed rate is too fast on the abrasive saw. You’re heating the metal. See the blue color?” He was right. The end of my last cut had a blue tint, meaning I’d overheated it and possibly ruined the temper. “Let the blade do the work,” he said. “Slow and steady.” I adjusted. The next cuts were cleaner, with no discoloration. By the time the workshop closing bell rang, I had three neat stacks of cut metal on the new rack we built yesterday. Every piece was the right length, square, and deburred. My hands were sore, my shirt was covered in metal dust, but I felt a different kind of tired. It was the tired you get from doing a job right.

Looking back on the week, it all connected. Monday showed me the future with the electric vehicle and how precise everything has to be. Tuesday gave me the language to understand my tools – E6013 and E7018 weren’t just numbers anymore. Wednesday taught me how to fight gravity in 1F, 2F, and 3F. Thursday let me use that knowledge to build something real and useful for the workshop. And Friday was about discipline – doing the basic job of cutting metal with the kind of accuracy that makes every other job easier. I didn’t just learn welding positions or electrode codes. I learned how a workshop actually runs. From the high-voltage safety of an EV to the simple act of stacking metal so it doesn’t rust, every step matters. And that, I think, was the point of the week.