A mechanic is not a mechanical engineer
Before university I spent six months as an apprentice in a car workshop, because I thought it would give me a head start on a mechanical engineering degree. Three years into the degree, I think I was mostly wrong. I loved it anyway.
I thought it would be a head start.
I finished secondary school in 2021 and then had a gap while I prepared for the university entrance exam. I was going to study mechanical engineering, so I assumed the first thing to understand was how a car works.
In May 2022 I joined D'leye Automobile as an apprentice and stayed six months, until October. It was a small local workshop, not a big established one. I wasn't paid. I paid them for the months I spent learning.
Nine o'clock until the job was done.
I got in around nine, sometimes later because I lived far away, and we stopped when the job was finished, usually between six and eight in the evening. Smartphones weren't allowed in the workshop.
The first thing I learned was how to raise a car on a jack. After that came changing a tyre, opening the bonnet and loosening parts. Over the six months I worked on rewiring, shock absorbers, tie rods, suspension links and faulty starter motors, which every mechanic here calls the kick. Once we took the ceiling lining out of a car and replaced it in a different fabric, by hand, because the owner wanted the car refreshed. That took a day and a full night, and it came out neat.
None of that was the hard part. I was the youngest apprentice, so I carried the tools. When a client's car broke down on the road, we went to it and the tools went with me. When we bought replacement parts at the market, I carried those too. And the 10 mm socket went missing constantly.
Know what can go wrong before it does.
The shock absorber
My boss looked after the executive cars for a large school in Ogun State, so some days we worked there. On one of those jobs we were fighting a small screw, I dropped the shock absorber, and it tore. The oil came out. I tried hard to patch it and couldn't, so it had to be replaced. The next time we fitted one, we knew exactly how careful we had to be, and it didn't happen again.
The pulley
On a Toyota Sienna we had installed a compressor and were putting the belt back on. We used too much force and broke a nut, which broke the pulley, and the water pump gasket went with it. The replacement took a long time to arrive. We were lucky to have a patient client.
The engine I can't finish the story of
One car had an engine that would not run properly. We started with the cheap parts: spark plugs first, which changed little. Then the nozzles and the fuel injection, one part at a time. We tested the brain box, and it was fine. I can't tell you what the fault turned out to be. It was four years ago, I have no photos, and I didn't keep a diary. I should have.
My boss was angry about the broken parts, and he had reason to be: he was the one who had to replace them and pay. Mistakes should be avoided, but in a workshop you can't stop everything from going wrong. What you can do is know what could happen before you pick up the spanner.
Where the two meet, and where they don't.
Some of it did carry over. Thermodynamics has a section on engines and their cycles, and combustion made sense to me because I had already seen it under the bonnet. Cooling was the same: I had a picture of how the radiator, the compressor and the fluids work together before any lecturer drew one. That is more overlap than I used to admit.
Suspension shows both the overlap and the gap. A suspension is a set of links, and how those links move is kinematics, which the degree teaches along with the mathematics behind it. In the workshop I learned what each link does and how to put a new one back exactly where the old one was. A mechanic knows how the parts work and reproduces that. An engineer is supposed to know why they work, and the principle underneath.
Other things did not carry over at all. Nothing in my courses so far looks like rewiring a car or tracing a fault through a relay box.
What was missing
We never had to make a part. Almost every car we worked on had spares in the market, so the fix was always to buy the part and fit it. Nobody needed to model a part, analyse it or work out how to manufacture it. That is the work I do now, and it would have been very interesting to see it meet a real broken car.
Would I tell a new student to do it?
I'm not sure. Don't do it expecting a head start on the degree. But if you have the gap, and you want to work with your hands before the theory starts, it is worth the time. I would keep a diary.