Appendix VII Equipment Lists for Occupational Education Programs Through the courtesy of Professor Charles F. Ward of the Division of Occupational Education of North Carolina State University, we secured the equipment lists compiled for over a hundred different occupational curricula by the Division of Occupational Education of the North Carolina Department of Community Colleges. These curricula were arranged in alphabetical order and numbered by the North Carolina Division of Occupational Education: The absence of many numbers from the sequence suggests that the list is quite incomplete. The North Carolina list overlaps to some extent the list of occupational curricula offered in the public colleges of the California Community Colleges. The overlap indicates common and nationwide needs - the lack of complete correspondence is due in part to the inferred incompleteness of the North Carolina lists and to local needs and interests-e.g., there would not likely be a course in oenology in North Carolina, nor a course in textiles technology in California. Each list obtained from North Carolina is a detailed and priced inventory of the equipment needed to open a curriculum for a specified number of students, ranging from 12 students to 30. The lists were examined by the project director. He identified the items that would have to be replaced, supplemented, or modified in order to teach a suitably metric curriculum; these costs were totaled for each curriculum. The estimated costs of replacing small and large items (R/small_and R/large in the table) at a break-point of $50 and of small and large modifications (M/small and M/large in the table) at a break-point of $100 were summed, and the results are tabulated on the following pages. The lists which showed significant costs were sorted into groups of related subjects and each group was examined by an occupational education specialist in that area to see if the list seemed to be reasonable for the curriculum, and to check on the earlier estimate of the cost of metric conversion. Our observations at project FEAST showed that very little would need to be changed in the kitchens and bakeries of this sector of occupational education. Thermometers would have to be replaced, but they are an inexpensive component of the ovens they monitor. Scales and volume-measuring containers are much more important in baking than in cooking, yet even there The sums are rounded to the nearest hundred dollars. The modifications are typically the replacement of gauges, thermometers and linear scales as small components of larger systems, and the replacement of lead screws and other major components of relatively expensive machinery. The latter were estimated at 10 percent of the cost of a new machine for small machines and 5 percent for larger machines. These modifications have been outlined in "Measure for Measure: a Guide to Metrication for Workshop Crafts and Technical Studies," see the Bibliography, p. 200. A lathe can be modified for cutting metric screws by providing a different set of gears connecting the headstock spindle with the changegear box, while various dials can be obtained to read in both English and metric units simultaneously for use with crossfeed screws and with the feed screws of milling machines and other machine tools. A number of design possibilities are discussed in "Machine Tools for Metric Production," also described in the Bibliography, p. 201. great precision is not required, and inexpensive modifications of existing scales can be made rather than the expensive modification which would seem to be needed in scales constructed to meet the standards of retail trade.2 We are indebted to Mrs. Hilda Gifford of Project FEAST, and to the following persons who helped us with the evaluation of the North Carolina lists: Tapan Banerjee, John Majkut, Richard D'Onofrio, and Edward VanDusen. * Estimated at $150 per scale for manual computing scales in food retailing, and $1000 per scale for prepackaging printing scales, Conference report, Conference on Consumer-Oriented Industry, National Metric Study Conferences, Washington, D.C., 21-25 September 1970. Table 1. Equipment inventories for selected occupational curricula-original costs and estimated costs for metric conversion |