A Mechanic - It's Highly Paid When You Reach for the Top

From early last century, there has been a huge interest in the internal combustion engine and in fact any engine that has powered a car, boat or plane. But the internal combustion engine has always remained the mainstay of interest, generally because of all the possibilities of taking it out of its manufactured state and with a number of modifications making it faster than the factory had envisaged. So this may take the form of an ordinary road car, a boat powered with a car engine, a jet ski, a skimobile, even a chain saw.

To learn the intricacies of modifying a motor, first one has to learn the basics of mechanical engineering. This is a four year apprenticeship, a rigid four year practical and written and oral program that ends with the apprentice becoming a fully qualified auto or car mechanic.

At this point of his/her mechanical career, the mechanic can choose a variety of different paths to specialize in. This could be in the form of a motor cycle mechanic, a boat outboard motor mechanic, a truck diesel mechanic, or, a garden tool mechanic which would specialize in motor mowers and chainsaws.

So the mechanical training that he/she has already gone through will certainly cover the basics of any of these specialties, but, there will be new things to learn, especially for the trainee boat mechanic, who will learn all about jet unit drives, stern drives plus outboard motors.

From here though after he/she gains even more experience then there is the possibility of further achievement by way of after market tuning services. Here the mechanic enters a new innovative sphere as a tuning mechanic for, say, race boats, race cars, plus, racing jet skis and racing skimobiles. The skies the limit at this stage because the now highly qualified mechanic can demand a very high price for skills associated with creating more horsepower out of an ordinary mass produced motor. At this stage, achieving more horsepower is very competitive with others as accomplished and experienced, so in most cases to achieve a higher horsepower, or, torque band, is going to go down to the wire in innovation, clever thinking and access to excellent machinery.

In many cases the innovative mechanic has learnt his skills and trade from an early age by perhaps been brought up in a rural area like a farm, where through a non easy accessibility to engineers because of the rural areas' proximity to well set up city engineers, they have had to invent tools and processes to overcome this. In this way many of them have a huge head start on their city based colleagues.

A recent example of this was the sad passing away of the legendary American hero, Carroll Shelby, who had been a wealthy but unhappy chicken farmer before taking to his dream of motor racing and developing and engineering highly tuned cars which he did so well in collaboration with Ford, in developing the Shelby Mustang and with the conservative British sports car manufacturer, AC, in developing the AC Cobra of the 1960's.

There's still a lot of budding Carroll Shelby's around the world and room for a lot more so if you've got a mechanical yearning - what are you waiting for.