"Hard to believe"
oops 
"fantastic"

what... I once  tought a 4 year old how to rebuild a VW 1600 dual port motor .I gave him 15 minutes of instructions and taught him a few German cuss words.it took him three hours and it was perfect.

CBA Shooter I actually do believe you !
Some young folks are born with allot of God given common and some are also very mechanically inclined at birth.

ssdave unfortunately all of our metal shops both Jr. High and High School have all been shut down. Everything has since been directed towards computer related educations. I spent 15 years at our school district in both the maintenance and construction departments and so I personally watched all of these shops going away. Two of the high school shops had just received two new CNC Mills and I don't believe they were ever used. I also took metal shop classes at one of these high schools and we also did sand castings at the time. Unfortunately this also happened to several of the automotive shop classes as well. Not sure what actually caused these changes that decision was well above my pay grade. I was also not able to run a lathe or mill at the tine as that was only available to the upper clases at the time. So I too am also self taught but having being to spend two years with Barry Darr who lived with us at the time I was able to be taught and learned allot.