Hi
I'm new to this forum, and to welding, but have been enrolled on a City and Guilds Level 1 evening course for the last month or so at my local college. My aim is to learn enough to do basic bodywork and chassis repair on an older VW, so I'm paying for the course out of my own pocket.
Does anyone else here have experience of what sort of level of training/interaction with the tutors I should expect? Being entirely new to welding, I'd expected that techniques would be demonstrated clearly and that the tutors would be checking to see that I'd understood (watch to make sure I'm doing it right etc) and give decent feedback.
Instead, I'm pretty well left to my own devices, unless I hunt down a tutor and then I get very little assistance before they move on. For the first few weeks of the course my fellow students and i were told to just 'muck around' with the equipment to see what it does. Not knowing what it should do (what constitutes a good and bad weld) that was just wasted time.
Several of us students have renamed the course 'teach yourself to weld' and it seems that we're just paying to use the equipment, rather than any proper tuition. (And the equipment isn't always complete or working properly). A couple of weeks ago, we ran out of scrap to work on, and couldn't find anyone to give us more, so we ended up teaching ourselves how to use the guillotine, which I'm sure isn't good H&S?
Is the above par for the course for a C&G level 1? Is it normal that students are expected to just keep playing around until they work it out for themselves, or should there be a decent amount of interaction with the tutors?
For the price of the course, I could have bought an entry level MIG machine, 'mucked about with it' in my garage and have learned more by posting the results on here.
I'd appreciate your opinions, as I'm on the verge of writing to the college to complain, but I don't know if I'm expecting too much?
Cheers
Andy
I'm new to this forum, and to welding, but have been enrolled on a City and Guilds Level 1 evening course for the last month or so at my local college. My aim is to learn enough to do basic bodywork and chassis repair on an older VW, so I'm paying for the course out of my own pocket.
Does anyone else here have experience of what sort of level of training/interaction with the tutors I should expect? Being entirely new to welding, I'd expected that techniques would be demonstrated clearly and that the tutors would be checking to see that I'd understood (watch to make sure I'm doing it right etc) and give decent feedback.
Instead, I'm pretty well left to my own devices, unless I hunt down a tutor and then I get very little assistance before they move on. For the first few weeks of the course my fellow students and i were told to just 'muck around' with the equipment to see what it does. Not knowing what it should do (what constitutes a good and bad weld) that was just wasted time.
Several of us students have renamed the course 'teach yourself to weld' and it seems that we're just paying to use the equipment, rather than any proper tuition. (And the equipment isn't always complete or working properly). A couple of weeks ago, we ran out of scrap to work on, and couldn't find anyone to give us more, so we ended up teaching ourselves how to use the guillotine, which I'm sure isn't good H&S?
Is the above par for the course for a C&G level 1? Is it normal that students are expected to just keep playing around until they work it out for themselves, or should there be a decent amount of interaction with the tutors?
For the price of the course, I could have bought an entry level MIG machine, 'mucked about with it' in my garage and have learned more by posting the results on here.
I'd appreciate your opinions, as I'm on the verge of writing to the college to complain, but I don't know if I'm expecting too much?
Cheers
Andy