The machine department trains fifty boys in the day course and under normal conditions the boy graduates after 4,800 hours of study, seventy-five per cent. being trade practice and twenty-five per cent. academic study. At present many boys leave before the completion of their course to enter local munition factories. These boys are in great demand and even after a few months of training are found extremely useful in those factories.
The boys who complete their studies and receive their diplomas are largely sought for tool room work.
Thus the school is supplying more trained hands than the number of boys and length of course would indicate and that is but part of the story. These boys work eight hours a day, forty-four hours a week, fifty weeks a year, and produce real machinery practically all of which goes into the munition plants.
One lot of forty-five Horizontal Tappers was built and boxed and ready for shipment to Glasgow for use on British munitions long before cargo space was available.
The boys build two sizes of screw slotting machines, two sizes of horizontal tapping machines, lathes, slide rests, drill press vises and hundreds of small cutters.
They have built and shipped about six hundred machines, not including slide rests and vises.
The screw slotters and tapping machines are of a type in great demand for munition factories, being particularly serviceable for use on fuse parts, small arms and government hardware.
Thus, the school, while following its basic plan, is supplying the country’s vital needs in training boys and at the same time making an essential product.
In addition, further use of the equipment is secured by the operation of night continuation classes for twenty-five weeks in the year. The classes are operated six nights per week and Saturday afternoon with instructors taken from the local factories under one of the regular day force.
Men in all stages of experience, ambitious apprentices, unskilled clerks, drivers, porters, etc., who wish to enter the local munition factories come to these classes.