Common Occupational Skills
Safety, measurement, and fastening discipline
This domain rewards working like a professional rather than simply turning wrenches. Expect items on PPE and shop hazards (exhaust ventilation, battery hydrogen, airbag deployment zones, rotating fans), WHMIS/SDS awareness, jacking and supporting a vehicle on rated stands at approved lift points, and fire extinguisher classes - A for ordinary combustibles, B for flammable liquids, C for energized electrical, D for combustible metals. Know the handling and recycling rules for used oil, coolant, refrigerant, solvents, and batteries, and lock out power before working near cooling fans or high-voltage systems.
Know your measuring tools: vernier calipers, outside micrometers, telescoping gauges paired with a micrometer for bore work, dial indicators for runout and backlash, and crush gauges for bearing clearance. Clicker torque wrenches tighten only, are stored at the lowest setting, and are never used to break fasteners loose. Understand torque-to-yield fasteners, torque-plus-angle sequences, and thread repair, where the tapping drill size is approximately the major diameter minus the thread pitch.
Traps: mixing inch and metric values; reading only the barrel and ignoring the thimble; quoting a measurement without a tolerance; using a torque wrench as a breaker bar; assuming a fastener that used to be reusable still is.
Worked example: A metric micrometer shows 7.5 mm at the barrel edge and line 22 on the thimble. Reading = 7.5 mm + (22 × 0.01 mm) = 7.72 mm. Always compare that number to the published specification and range - a measurement with no spec is trivia.