So I'm currently active duty Air Force and I'm starting to get really bored with my job. There is nothing on the F-16 I haven't torn apart twice and rebuilt. I'm seriously thinking bout pullin chocks and get into heavy equipment world for the fact of variety of equipment to work on and makes the job more unpredictable. My wife wants to move close to her family in Huntington, WV, but has a 200 mile radius that she would be comfortable with rather living in Florida where I am currently stationed. I plan on stopping by a local Whayne dealer in Ashland, KY when we visit for Christmas to try and talk with a shop foreman or somebody that would give me a real world answer of what to know about the industry. So some of my first off questions are..... Is Caterpillar a decent company to work for? I'm sure it varies dealer to dealer on benefits/pay/and quality of boss's.... I hope overtime is always, but then again cant pay employees with a shop with no equipment to work on...... What about familiarization training with new style equipment (example......when 120M first came out with joystick on a grader) Field Service versus Shop Mechanic......what's the difference..... Start out tools, bank loan???..... I am a test take away from having my Airframe and Powerplant license to work on civilian aircraft, but working on Aircraft is a touch of delicacy and finesse. There's so many rules and regulations with it. Also too, forget something on an aircraft and a life is at risk. Forget something on a tractor, and it just falls off in the mud... I am just looking for some advice on this industry and trying to decide on what I want to do. I am at 8 years in and usually 10 is max at turning wrenches before I get into management if I stay in the military, I want to keep turning wrenches because to hell with babysitting airmen who want to do dumb stuff.....
Forget something on a tractor, and it just falls off in the mud...this comment will do you no favours at all!
Maybe not as many lives at stake but try talking to the widow of the operator who died because you left a eclip off the brake linkage. Or the owner operator who was depending on that machine to finish the job that was going to pay his morgage.
My brother in law was a Marine for 20 years working on the Prowlers. I have to change his brakes and diagnose his car coil packs for he doesnt know how. I also had to help him change is lower drive on his boat for he was stuck on getting it off. I hope he was a better mecahnic working on the Prowler than working on his own stuff.
I worked for a Cat dealer number of years in a country where military service was compulsory. The "bright boys" always went into the Navy or Air Force instead of simply being grunts and putting their time in because it gave them some sort of qualification to work with after their enlistment ended. That said we tended to use those type of guys as diagnostic technicians, running test benches, hydraulic component rebuilds, etc, etc. One ex-Air Force guy ran our truck payload scales for example. The reason was simple that they were used to working on machinery that required repeatable working to strict checklists on high-precision, high-standard work and didn't have to be trained in the basics. I would say forget being a heavy equipment technician/mechanic (at least initially because of your lack of hands-on experience with the equipment) and maybe look at what a dealer might have in their component rebuild centre. The dealers in the states you mention all have them. Please don't take this the wrong way but as others have pointed out already maybe you might need a slight "attitude shift" to fit into the heavy equipment industry. Rules and Regulations are probably just as strict in our field as they are in yours, just that the rules will be different. The consequences of failure are just the same - worst case scenario people die.
I knew there was going to be "some backlash" after the 2nd post. The dude is just trying to test the waters.. WE WERE ALL YOUNG AND DUMB "ONCE".. F-16> you can tell by the responses WE ALL take this VERY SERIOUSLY.. Its are lives and the lives of people we love.. I know "that comment" was made in "jest" believe me..I've made worse..lol As far as "taking out a bank loan" to pay for tools in a field that may or may not pan out.. in this economy... NOT SMART MY FRIEND.. Stick with WHAT YOU KNOW.. PAY THE BILLS and sock it away till things get better.. The "old timers" are holding on to their knowledge and waiting to retire.. the "young ones" are hopeing to get layed off so they can "collect a check.. GOD knows, it can ONLY get better.. Give the guy "alittle" slack, fellas. lol
im gonna give my 2 cents worth!! take the test & STAY WORKING ON AIRCRAFT!!!!! I have been in the heavy equipment mechanic for 30 years its hard work & it starts catching up to you as you get older.. I know several mechanics that work for fed-ex & love it.. whayne supply was bought out a few years ago & it hasn't been for the best in their opinion!! I know several guys that have been there for years & cant wait to retire now that its not family owned.. if you are good mechanic like you say you can go anywhere & get a job!!! there are several heavy equipment dealers around whayne supply, Rudd equipment, Brandies equipment , are the big 3 so to speak around that area. If you are set on the equipment job..
I lean somewhat with FSERVICE about staying in the aircraft field you have been trained in F16Mechanic.It's a tough decision as you allready have 8 years in the Air Force with training.For myself the question would be ...Should I stay in the Air Force for the duration & retire after 12 more years then maybe try a new line of work? I can certainly understand your need to settle down closer to familly. I would think a CAT dealership would be as good of a place to work as any if you decide heavy equipment is the way to go. I enjoy field repair the best.Its never boring ,almost allways challenging, and the customer is happy to see you drive up to the dead piece of equipment & fix it. Good luck either way you decide F16.
I apologize for my wording of "forget something on an aircraft and a life is at risk. Forget something on a tractor, and it just falls off in the mud...". I figured it would be a dark humor ice breaker.... There is lots of opportunity on the outside for me. I got buddies working @ Lockheed Martin on F-35 wanting me to come work for them, theres jobs for Lockheed where I can go to other countries and teach them how to turn wrenches on F-16's and make $100+k yr WITH living expenses provided, I have talked with railroad a couple years ago prior to re-enlisting and they wanted to take me on as a supervisor since Im already an NCO over people. I worked road construction on a dirt crew building 4 lane highway before I joined, so my "walkaround" knowledge of equipment came from that. I am very mechanically inclined, if it was bolted and manufactured, I can figure out how to work on it. I was just looking into this field as an option to see what kind of response I would get. I figured I could use some of my aircraft experience along with learning the ropes on heavy equipment. I have a real good understanding of what problems chaff'd wires/hyd lines would create. I could apply fleet management knowledge to a company with lots of equipment to manage. I assume most mechanics have repair manuals to reference to for troubleshooting or part removal for trying to figure out how to remove a part the size of a watermelon out of a hole made for a cantelope. Granted I don't need a manual to tell me how to do majority of the work, just now and then for a reference. I also was wanting to look into locomotive diesel mechanic at the Huntington, WV CSX Locomotive shop. I have a lot of options available, I am merely checking out each one..... @Nige, the component rebuild is kinda exactly what I wanted to do. The CAT certified rebuild program where a machine is stripped to frame and rebuilt is kinda like what we do on a CANN aircraft. We will designate an aircraft to be parked for 45-60 days. If a part is needed for another, then it is "borrowed" from the CANN bird and placed on order for it. Once the 45 days are up, there is a 15 day "rebuild" time where all the new parts are installed on the CANN bird to make it flight worthy again. Granted it seems easy saying it, but making it happen is a nightmare depending on how raped that CANN jet gets.... @FMD, yes 70% of military mechanics suck at doing anything they wasn't taught. Hell, there was a kid we got 2 years ago, we had to teach him "lefty loose, righty tighty". But the time I have been in, most of the good mechanics that hold a unit together getting jets fixed quick and are confident @ their job, have mostly been country boys growing up working on lawn mowers and cars.
I am sure that your original comment was in jest, and I took it that way. But as others posted above we take safety very seriously in our industry and things have come on in leaps and bounds over even the last 10-15 years. I just wanted to make sure that you understood that you could potentially be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Like I said in my first post, you have zero heavy equipment experience but you do have some very marketable skills from your present life as per the examples you mention above. Certified Rebuilding is becoming more and more popular, not least that it gets the customer a "new" machine (complete with a new Serial Number) with warranty for a little over half the price of a brand-new one. If you seriously want to get into heavy equipment with a Cat dealer then use the skills and experience that you've gained working on aircraft and leverage them to the maximum to make yourself atractive to a potential employer. As you say, problems with chafing harnesses or hydraulic lines can have the same result whether it's on an aircraft or on a piece of heavy equipment. Sometimes it can be refreshing to have someone looking at the work going on who has no preconceived ideas about "how it should be done". Best of luck.
F16, don't get discouraged by us crazy yellow iron guys. You have a lot going for you just from a discipline standpoint to say nothing about the technical aspect. I was in your shoes a little over forty years ago but different circumstances. Back then there was little interest in hiring vets, my first job app I didn't even list my military service. When I quit my boss told me "if I had known I would have fired you", it was a different time. The good thing was it was a transition time where equipment makers were just starting to incorporate electronics into machines. The dealers were looking for people that weren't afraid of getting dirty and knew their way around electrical and electronic stuff. I put in an application at a dealer, they were looking for road service personnel at customers locations that could work alone unsupervised. When the interview was arranged there were quite a few applicants (a couple good mechanics that I knew, small town) and I was last. When the questioning got around to where I got my electronics experience I had to confess my service and my last duty station was in Germany working on mrbm's. Well I thought that was the end of this interview as they said "we will let you know in a day or two" (kind of like the check is in the mail). Well they called and I got the job. When I questioned as to their reason, the main one's were related more to discipline and ability to learn new things than to experience in that particular field. So hang in there and give it a go.
U GOT A OFFER TO LOOKHEED MARTIN? & u still want to work on yellow iron??? ***!!! :crazy unless you are just tired of aircraft & want a change of life I don't understand. but then again I have been in the field all my life never worked in a shop setting!!!
That's what I was thinking too... I don't think any dealer is hiring at anywhere near $100k, you might make that on your own IF_______... but you'll be busting your butt to do it. I'd think anybody in that range is going to be sitting at a desk, not out in the shop.
Im definitely not money chasing, if so, I would do the Saudi deal, work 2 years and have 200K in the pocket, come home pay cash for a house and be a Wal-Mart greeter. My situation is, a lot of guys active now are burned out on making sorties happen, supervision with no backbone hoarding us out to do other stuff while the workload stays the same, our career field is undermanned and Air Force could care less. We get paid the same as guys working finance who cry if their hour lunchbreak is cut short, work 7-3 while flightline guys get boned with working 12's. Its a job we love to hate. I can have a crappy day and stop for a minute to watch the jets take off in full AB at night and then tell myself I like my job. Im getting tired of being the 80/20 crew (20% getting 80% of work done). I would take any job that I feel I would enjoy long as I can make a decent lifestyle out of the paycheck. I can vent all day about the dumb stuff that is with the military today that wouldn't be happening 6 years ago. Im just trying to see if the grass is greener on the other side. What about some of ya'lls health care? Really high premiums for crap service? That's something ive been wondering about. If I decide to jump ship, how bad off am I going to be with wife and 2 kids (1yr & 3yr) Also too, anything unionized? Buddy mine who works @ Lockheed is stuck in a union in Maryland and he hates it now (this information is new, so I'm probably crossing LM off my list of employers). But if I look into the railroad venture, I am 100% sure I would get suckered into a union. Pro's/Cons?
F16, Just remember if something falls off in the mud, guess who has to go pick it up and put it back on! You could always stay in the ** and work on restoring antiques, Like those B-52's that were first designed when your dad was a kid! My brother used to fly as an EWO on one said it was like driving around in a 1952 Chevy.
Yeah, my first jet was an 83 model block 25, so yeah maintaining an aircraft that was designed to be a 2000 hour cheap throwaway is tough sometimes. F-16s have gone through many upgrades that they are really an easy aircraft to work on. My current aircraft Im a DCC on is a 97 model block 50. Most of the maintainers that work the "legacy" fighters and went on to work F-22 and F-35 hate these new aircraft. The things are poorly built and they are so idiot proof that it takes away any troubleshooting. When a jet tells itself it is broke and orders its own parts, that's just retarded. F-35 has parts that are designed to "last the life of the aircraft"? Yeah right, those parts are already failing. They thought that glueing nutplates was a weight saving idea, HAH! tell that to the guy trying to install panels so his jet can make the next sortie and breaks a nutplate because the glue failed.....shoulda bought upgraded Block 60 fighters and the new silent eagle, cheaper and it works!! So even tho some of the aircraft in the fleet might be considered antiques for the age, they get the job done and upgraded enough to teach an old dog new tricks....
Amen brother, as is the story of the C-130 Hercules, Aug 2014 will be 60 years for those birds and they still play a major role in transport fleets, a testament to building something right in the first place.
That's for real Willie. Those old girls still do regular flights from NZ all the way down to McMurdo Antartica today; I flew down there in one way back in 83. Took 9 hrs with a tailwind to come home Our airforce even 'dive bombed' a complete new D4E onto pitcairn island in the middle of the pacific ocean back in the 80s too. A truly remarkable aircraft :notworthy
C130's - I've got some good stories about things like hunting hippos or "low takeoff competitions" that resulted in an aircraft taking the boundary fence out of the field. Sadly we lost 2 aircraft, one to a simple navigational error, the other got a missile up its rear. That was Angola in the early 80's, the pilots were mostly Vietnam veterans ..........
Many a day I wish I was working on some of the Cat equipment I did back in the `70's When a wiring diagram fit on a page not much bigger than my hand and you could completely rewire a 966C in an afternoon. I recall being sent to a plant down near Richmond Va. to install a new wiring harness in a M50 off-highway Mack, any one work on them? Well I stripped out the old wires one at a time while waiting for the factory to ship the new harness making notes as I did it. Did not have a factory diagram to go by. After a couple days waiting my boss back in New york asked me if I could make up the wiring harness if I had enough wire. Some time after lunch that day I had the truck up and running. Gave my notes to the boss at the plant and was on my way back home to NY. Nice thing about that truck is most of the wiring was run through thin wall conduit just like a commercial building with standard 4 inch square boxes at the intersections. Not sure I would want to try to replace the wiring on the 773G we got last year!
Wiring is our biggest problem on fighters now. They were built with this Capton wiring with a coating on it that has deterieated. 70% of the parts the fault tree tells us to replace related to a problem doesn't fix it, its always the wiring has either broken or is chaffed. Is the new equipment now like a "fly by wire"? Where hydraulics is sent to a part, but wires instead of mechanical linkage actuates valves to open close?
Yes. Position sensors on the hydraulic controls send Pulse Width Modulated signals to an ECM that in turn actuates solenoids on the control valve to make the spools move to send the oil to the cylinders. One "feature" on our new 980K is that if you turn the front wipers on and then while operating the machine shift into reverse the wiper on the rear of the cab is automatically cycled. This "option" that can be de-selected in the main machine ECM. Steering is Joy-Stick control that has a feed back system to work against sudden or excessive movement of the joy-stick. Also if the operator does something the machine feels is abuse it will send me an email not to mention when it is time for scheduled maintenance.
So, now the machine can gripe about having to work, and ask for time off, too, not just the operators anymore?
I see you want to relocate close to Huntington WV. I live very close to there. Most heavy equipment repair jobs here are tied the the coal mines which are doing poorly now. Lots of layed off miners and and mines being idled which means less repairs. Walker equipment is the largest Cat dealer in the are but I think they have been sold to someone else. Not saying you cant do it but tough times in this area right now.
I'm not a pro as I'm still getting ready to start training but CAT has a "think big" program through their dealerships and you'd have your GI Bill to work with. I say if you want it go for it....I'm 34 and just figured out this is what I want to do....I wouldn't let anyone talk you out of your goals...nothing is one size fits all including life experiences.
Oh and as for forgetting parts...I think neglect makes flying more interesting