All the experience I gained in those shop courses and in my Dad's basement shop helped immensely in the course of my education and career as well.
In a high school AP biology course, I built a perfusion machine to keep rabbit kidneys alive without the benefit of a rabbit while I studied the effect of various contaminants in the blood stream. This involved building pumps, both blood and water, an oxygen diffusion gauge, and cannulae for connecting the kidney arteries and ureter to the machine.
The machine is long gone but I still have my documentation of the work including a hand-drawn sketch of the machine. I don't have a scanner big enough for it but I took this picture with it pinned to a window for maximum contrast; you should be able to get the idea of how it worked...
In college, one of the physics labs required us to build a radiation detector tube, turning metal and blowing glass. It was my first experience with making pass-through-glass wiring. I can remember helping several Bronx High School of Science graduates with the lathe work. They had grown up in New York apartments and had never seen anyone except the apartment house super use tools.
My senior project in college involved superconducting solenoids which meant more lathe work to make the coil forms and associated field measurement instrumentation . I was studying various properties of the Niobium-Zirconium wire in use then. These fist-sized coils could generate extremely intense fields while wired to an ordinary automobile battery because, of course, they had zero resistance so could draw huge amounts of current.
If they generated a sufficient field to drive themselves out of the superconducting region, they would dump all their stored energy back out as a huge current pulse. We kept a one ohm resistor wired across the battery as a fuse. It had lower resistance than the battery internal resistance, so the pulse would pass through it, blowing it to smithereens with a satisfying POP that alerted us to the fact that the field had collapsed.
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