The Disappearing Art of Maintenance
Is this a US thing?<p>Here&#x27;s a girl mechanic in China.[1]  She&#x27;s from a small village in the mountains, was able to go to a technical school in Kumming to learn hydropower, and came back to her village. She has a popular YouTube channel, so she&#x27;s making money off of that, as well as repairing broken engines and generators in the village.<p>Having restored rusty Teletype machines myself, I&#x27;m impressed with what she&#x27;s doing. She routinely rewinds generator armatures, which is almost a dead art in the US. (There&#x27;s one guy in San Francisco who still does that, and he has a backlog. He never got to the Teletype motors I wanted done. Urgent projects for old freight elevators and industrial equipment keep him busy.) She&#x27;s an artist with an angle grinder, making parts from sheet steel. She cuts curves with an angle grinder, something usually done with a bandsaw. Her welding is so-so, but she is using a crappy AC welder.<p>The engines she works on, usually small Diesels in the 5-30 KW range, are very basic and maintainable.
They&#x27;re a standard design in China from the Mao era. Look up &quot;R175 Diesel engine&quot;. Hand crank start, cooling system is a water tank you have to fill when you refuel, no oil pump. You can buy one on Alibaba for under US$200, shipping not included.[2]<p>There are people who post claiming she&#x27;s fake. But there are many hours of videos showing her work. Once or twice, there are indications of outside help with heavy lifting, but that&#x27;s about it. There are more informed nit-picks - getting paint on the mating faces of the cylinder head may cause leaks later, banging on bearings with a claw hammer can damage the bearing races, and those motors really need to go out the door with a motor protection circuit breaker (US$6 on Alibaba) so they don&#x27;t burn out the windings again. But all this stuff is overbuilt, to survive years of minimal maintenance in agricultural villages.<p>Although her electrical safety is scary. No strain relief where cables enter boxes, plain wires rather than nonmetallic armored behind walls when remodeling, standing in a stream while holding an outlet strip.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alibaba.com&#x2F;product-detail&#x2F;R175-Diesel-Engine-Engine-Single-Cylinder_60393287578.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alibaba.com&#x2F;product-detail&#x2F;R175-Diesel-Engine-En...</a>