Racing car for the display case
When Larissa Winkler meets her friends, her profession is rarely mentioned. This is because the 19-year-old turns threads, reads circuit diagrams and programs CNC milling machines. She is training as an industrial mechanic at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.
“My first project was a Formula 1 car - in my very first year of training,” recalls Larissa Winkler. She picks up a piece of steel that looks like a U. She used such a piece to make the body of the car, i.e. the part that is the driver's cab in a real racing car. On closer inspection, the layman can see that the U is a little unevenly shaped. “Crooked and bent,” she comments. That's how the steel was at the beginning. After the apprentice had worked on the piece, it corresponded to the dimensions in the construction sketch to within a tenth of a millimeter. Winkler spent six months sawing, filing, turning, milling and drilling on the racing car. She worked with steel, aluminum, copper, brass and plastics. In this way, she got to know the tools and materials that industrial mechanics work with.
During her apprenticeship, the budding industrial mechanic repeatedly produced small workpieces to practise the theory in practice. Now, in her third year of training, some of them are on display in a showcase in the training workshop. She carefully unwraps a model of the Munich television tower. A great deal of dexterity was required for this Plexiglas workpiece. The delicate tower could easily have broken when clamped in the machines. She selected the profile cutters suitable for the material and shape herself. "We wrote the program, measured the tools and entered the speed. The machine did the milling," reports the apprentice. She is enthusiastic about computer-controlled milling. Why? "Because you can mill out spherical curvatures, for example. That doesn't work on a conventional milling machine."
At the MPI for Physics, the apprentices not only work on miniature versions of racing cars and television towers, but also on physicists' projects. “Sometimes diploma or PhD students come to the training workshop with their sketches,” says Winkler: “Then we build them the parts they need for their experimental setup.” In the third year of the apprenticeship, it is up to Winkler to coordinate the plans with the physicists and plan the work steps. Her trainer Rainhard Kastner only intervenes in emergencies. The budding industrial mechanic will also take on a “real” work assignment for her final exam, for which she has 21 hours. She will then present her work to the examiners in a 30-minute technical discussion.
Even at school, Larissa Winkler was interested in technical issues and focused on manual dexterity. “Two important prerequisites for young people who want to train as industrial mechanics,” emphasizes Kastner, who no longer wants to do without trainees like Larissa Winkler. She is the only woman in the industrial mechanic training workshop. But that doesn't bother the quiet 19-year-old. After all, there are six of them out of a total of 22 students in their year at the vocational school. “That's a lot,” says Kastner, “on average, only one in ten apprentices is female.”
The apprenticeship to become an industrial mechanic lasts three and a half years. Applicants must have at least a good secondary school leaving certificate or an intermediate school leaving certificate. Vocational school and the training workshop alternate on the timetable: Two weeks of practical training at MPI are followed by one week of theory at vocational school.
Larissa Winkler will take her final exam after just three years. She would then like to stay at the MPI for physics for another six months, gain six months of work experience abroad and then probably study mechanical engineering.
By Nicole Voß