Jake Park

Skill Acquisition in Plumbing

Notes from my pre-apprenticeship.

Acquiring any skill follows the same process of:

Another common principle in skill acquisition is that you must pay most attention to what you’re acting on, not necessarily the body part that you are moving. For instance, when learning the piano, you focus on the sound, and often watch the keys; when drilling a screw into an object, you watch the screw and the object. This is because you can only track success/failure of the output and improve if you’re watching the output.

However, there are some habits specific to plumbing that take some time to install, especially for someone like me who comes from music/STEM. Though basic algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and mental arithmetic were helpful from time to time—and I do recommend learning these—there was relatively little transfer. Much of the headache in writing, teaching and communication is that everyone has a different starting point. Without this unbridgeable gap, communication would be redundant. A plumbing instructor in Australia can hopefully assume that students speak English, that they basically understand what “speed” and “force” mean, that they’ve seen a drill before. Beyond this, people start with hugely varying levels of experience. This is a very long cheatsheet covering what was obvious to those with prior experience but for me needed deliberate attention.

I hate the modern narcissism of pretending I’ve come up with anything on my own; all of my notes are simply a convenient rewriting of other people’s ideas, from my instructors’ remarks to the hundreds of books I’ve read. Even if instructors will tell you much of this at one point or another, it is still useful to have it written down and organised like this. Reading notes can direct you better in reality, and real experience can help you understand notes better. Notes may tell you that you should keep your SharkBite remover straight; you may have no idea what a SharkBite remover is, but you might try Googling it, then using one anyway according to the notes; the notes might then tell you how to position yourself better if you’re in an awkward spot. You do not read all the notes in one go and suddenly understand how to do everything. I do not like it when people pretend that writing/theory is useless, just as I do not like it being seen as superior to the practical reality that it refers to.

Force requirement

Many tasks require twice as much force or aggressive commitment as I originally thought, and then some:

It’s not like on a musical instrument where too much force just breaks the instrument. Moreover, rigidity/stiffness is often more important than flexibility. When bowing a violin, I have to keep my wrist loose and flexible. When using a hammer, I didn’t realise I have to keep my wrist a bit more rigid/locked rather than letting it totally flop around, because the point is greater force transmission, not precision. When drilling into sheet metal, I need to keep myself more rigid and really use my bodyweight to get it to bite. I lost a lot of time at the beginning of the course looking for more “elegant” solutions.

Part of the issue was that I was unsure how much force was allowable. I needed to repeatedly show myself that big force would not be catastrophic: at worst it would require a minor redo. This was similar to when I was learning to drive: I would constantly be overcautious because I didn’t yet have a baked-in intuition for how much space was safe. I would wait too long at roundabouts because I hadn’t yet learned that most minor mistakes are recoverable, that I could enter with a lot less space than I thought. The only solution was repeated expansion of my comfort zone: recognising that I was being too careful, taking a leap of faith, and going in faster and more decisively each time. Obviously, experimenting with neck massages or flamethrowers without supervision is a terrible idea, but:

My instructor faced a mirror problem when using computers: he had no idea which mistakes would lead to a massive headache (permanently deleting an important file) and which were trivially reversible (deleting tabs in Google Sheets), so he was afraid to do anything at all. Failures must be graded from annoying (sheet metal bent out of shape) to catastrophic (finger crushed in guillotine). Living in permanent fear is disproportionate and debilitating. In a world filled with uncertainty, you have to take leaps of faith on a constant basis. You do not “rationally” know with perfect certainty that a train won’t crash and kill you. You just board the train, and based on prior experience, assume that most of the time it will be safe. Beginners may be afraid of circular saws and guillotines and pressing down on the drill too hard. Once you’ve seen enough evidence that most failures aren’t catastrophic within a certain margin, you must take the leap.

Big adjustments

As a consequence of the force requirement, small adjustments often make little difference. It’s not like in singing, for instance, where a millimetre-scale difference in tongue position can produce a totally different result. If something wasn’t working, I often needed to double or even triple the force, change the tool straight up, or use a completely different angle. This kept causing me to repeat the same mistakes over and over because I thought I was changing something but I wasn’t. For example, when I was struggling to use a rivet gun, I would try a slightly different angle, and if that failed, I might use slightly higher force. If even that failed, I would run out of ideas. But the actual problem wasn’t the variable I was changing, but how much I was changing it: I should have tripled my force, using both hands and my bodyweight, and if that still didn’t work, I should have tried changing the rivet gun. A variable has not truly been tested unless it has been changed enough to alter the output.

Even if a lot of force is required, things shouldn’t require a convoluted, heroic effort. Such overcomplicated struggles, even if they work once, are unsustainable—they expend too much cognitive, physical and motivational energy. You should change something. It is like losing weight: fighting against hunger by force every day might work (constant extra effort that technically produces the desired result), but it is far more sustainable to eat according to appetite and figure out why your appetite is dysregulated (choose an alternate solution that is more sustainable). Wherever possible, change the root cause—whatever condition is leading to the symptom. Lots of physically strong people insist on using effortful, blunt-force solutions and end up getting injured. No matter how strong you are, you can do more and stay safer with more margin.

Visual demonstrations

Prior to plumbing I’d never learned any skills that require following visual demos. Violin teachers, for instance, tend to just adjust the instrument on your body rather than showing you. As a result, I didn’t realise how useful it can be initially just copy everything more or less exactly as is, from the visuals of the process to the angles to the stance. This often beats just copying the parts I think are important, which may lead to missing something that seems minor in the posture or movement that is actually load-bearing. For instance, when wrapping Teflon around threads, I didn’t realise I have to keep it tense by holding it on the inside with my thumb, because I was just copying the general idea—wrap tape around—instead of the precise motion. When copying demo projects/photos, it is often worth either copying as many little details as possible, or asking whether they are relevant.

This does not mean that official demonstrations are always ideal. “Thinking for yourself” means you have to improvise starting from something that basically works, even if it’s imperfect. It’s the difference between:

When I was trying to figure out oxy welding, I’d keep making minor adjustments that didn’t do anything, and I figured I could just keep changing things until I stopped producing bird crap. My classmates told me I should wait for another demo. They were right. Experimenting blindly is a waste of time if there’s already a confirmed good base to start from.

Planning and sequencing

Actions in plumbing are often costly or time-consuming to reverse. Lower reversibility means it is more important to spend some time at the beginning chunking the task into smaller parts, and determining which tasks should be performed in what order. It is also paramount to spend some time thinking hard about geometry: what hidden extra lengths might be necessary? Where is length not as important? In contrast, when writing an essay or a computer program, I can often just sort of start chucking things on the page, and if there’s a problem I can instantly move stuff around. And when learning a musical piece, the order is already set for me, and I don’t have to think about sequencing. This sequencing flexibility inherited from other domains often becomes a bad habit in plumbing.

Tool geometry

Each tool works best at a certain angle and with a certain geometry. Because we often use the same tools, a tremendous amount of time can be saved by getting this right from the start:

Tool geometry often needs to be memorised by rote. Although it is often useful to try to understand why things are a certain way, with these features, there is basically no deeper reason than they’re designed that way, and that’s how they work. Much time can be wasted trying to “understand” something on a deeper level that doesn’t have a deeper level. For example:

Most people have heard “righty tighty, lefty loosey”, but:

It is also important to ask: what needs to move against what, and in what fashion? No matter how much you adhere to the Correct Method™, you will keep making ridiculous errors if you do not ask this question:

Drill tips

And an explanation of gears:

The clutch number is a different mechanism: it sets the maximum allowed torque before the clutch disengages. When the screw reaches resistance—because its head contacts the material, it bottoms out, or it becomes stuck—the clutch separates the motor from the chuck. This prevents driving the screw too deep, crushing a rubber sealing washer, damaging material, and so on. The drill-bit mode bypasses the clutch for continuous drilling; the hammer mode is mostly for masonry.

Gripping tools

Because there are so many similar tools, these notes would have saved me a lot of confusion:

Reducing context-switching

The time spent moving around, switching tools, re-measuring, and so on adds up very quickly and leads to mistakes. For instance, instead of going back and forth between cutting pipes and hanging them up, it is much faster to write down all the necessary lengths, cut them all at once, and then hang them. When making flashings, get all the pieces of sheet metal first, mark them out, cut them, and then start riveting, drilling or folding.

Positioning/strength

Working against gravity is harder:

Ridiculously, I scored in the high 40s in VCE Physics and still had to be reminded of these basic applications. This is the problem with modern teaching: it incorrectly segments people into “visual” and “abstract” learners, which is insane. What’s the point of learning about mathematical formulae that describe objects moving around if we’ve never even seen those objects move around? It’s like describing colour to a blind person. A blind person could tell you that red is darker than orange. That doesn’t mean they understand colour. Language helps describe and understand complex experience; it cannot replace it, because words and symbols are too small to contain it all. How could they possibly transmit the feeling of the precise angle, force, positioning, and every other minor detail with which aviation snips work on corrugated sheet metal, let alone install it all in muscle memory? They can point at it vaguely, but how it feels in your body cannot be reduced to language. In other words, theory is very useful, but only once you understand what it is referring to and directing. My physics classes should have been interweaved with real demonstrations of practical tool use; instead, we only ever theorised about objects we never saw. Little things like:

Change the geometry of the problem to favour you. Clamp it. Brace it against the workbench. Put timber under it. Move it closer. You want less stuff to keep track of—as few moving parts as possible. Much of what people call “strength” is actually about skill rather than muscle size. Within the middle range, muscle size actually has less to do with strength/power than people think. Bruce Lee was tiny but had immense power. Working out is only helpful if you’re training the correct skills—muscle size is nice to have but often unnecessary, and a surprising number of gym exercises are unhelpful in plumbing. For instance, I found active hangs and table rows to be great for rivet guns, saws, and snips, as they train grip strength and pulling endurance. I routinely saw more muscular guys struggle with snips and rivet guns because they didn’t understand leverage, or didn’t properly train grip strength/endurance. Again, it’s all about sustainability. No matter how strong you are, it’s better to reduce as much friction as possible throughout the day. Use your bodyweight for the rivet gun or flaring tool. Put a stand below your slanted sheets so that you can rivet them together without the bottom one drooping lower. Change your position so you can drill straight instead of accepting an awkward tilt.

Purposeful mindfulness

The blessing and curse of the human mind is that it saves energy by reducing attention on routine things that don’t appear to matter much. The problem is is that if you start doing things absent-mindedly, you get screwed the second the angle changes. You have to remain mindful. Mindfulness is awareness of awareness—that is, control over attention. Much of modern “meditation” is a rehabilitation effort for phone-addled people who can no longer sustain awareness or control of their attention. Unlike older meditative traditions, modern meditation is simply marketed as “stress relief” with no deeper goal. However, simply being mindful is useless; you must know what to be mindful of and keep your attention there.

What needs to be done here? How can I make this task easier? What are common failure modes? Mindfulness is not micromanaging every minor movement—it is about paying attention to the important things and letting everything else be automatic. Too often, I would find myself riveting or drilling at an uncomfortable angle with my arms too far away and with insufficient support. Why? Because I was letting too many shallow thoughts drift into my mind instead of focusing on how I could make my task more ergonomic. Without intentional control, your attention drifts to whatever the monkey brain finds most urgent. Notice problems, then find ways to fix or work around them. Don’t just resign yourself to pointless suffering. This seems like it should be common sense, but it isn’t. If you never get enough sleep, go to bed earlier, or maybe stop drinking coffee. If you’re afraid of spiders, expose yourself to them more. If you keep bumping your head into things, pay more attention to your head’s surroundings. Don’t just blame a bad day, bad boss, bad partner, bad drill, bad traffic, or bad luck. These are all fixable problems. It’s not complicated, but we never do it.

Even worse, many people confuse endurance with virtue: tolerating recurring friction feels more legitimate than altering the conditions. This is a strange moral error that must be addressed psychologically. Sometimes, this comes from a misinterpretation of religion. But the Bible never says pointless suffering is good: Christ himself asks to be spared of his tribulation. Or in the case of Buddhism, the Buddha never says you should just ignore pain; he himself frequently complains of back pain and rests. Working so much every day that you don’t get enough sleep isn’t virtuous; it is stupid. Physical training beyond the point of failure isn’t a sign of character; it is unnecessary damage. And in plumbing, using a broken rivet gun or committing to an awkward angle so that you can convince yourself that you are more adaptable is absurd. All you are doing is practising how to use broken tools at bad angles. This might be useful in rare cases, but it’s time and energy you could be using instead on practising a more efficient, sustainable approach.

Measuring, marking, and Keeping It Straight™

Measuring and marking make up much of plumbing. As for tools:

Some tips on marking:

Some tips on procedure:

Unless you have a perfect photographic memory, all of this saves a tremendous amount of time, and you won’t have to constantly redo your work. Finally, some tips on Keeping It Straight™:

Improvisation

“Overthinking” is a filter problem: not knowing which constraints are important. Many measurements don’t have to be millimetre-precise. It’s okay if there’s one too many rivets. The solution is to ask: what needs to be satisfied? Where does the water have to flow? Where does the timber have to fit in? And then even if it doesn’t go perfectly according to plan, you can improvise and find a way to satisfy this constraint:

Understanding the purpose of what you’re making is crucial. For instance, water is meant to bounce off of flashings, down the roof, and into the spouting/gutter and through the downpipes. A chef that doesn’t have an idea of how he wants his dish to taste and feel has no idea what to do when he makes a mistake following a recipe. A good chef can repair a dish by adding more salt or water or herbs or spices. A good musician can pretend that his mistake wasn’t actually a mistake by improvising a different melody. An expert isn’t someone who makes no mistakes—this is impossible—but someone who has multiple contingencies for each one. Once you have decided on an improvisation, you must commit. If you do something halfway and predictably fail, you have learned nothing about whether it would have worked. It is like driving: the worst thing you can do is to start executing an idea, then stop halfway. At least if you fully execute an idea, you get some of the intended result. If you stop in the middle of the road, you crash and burn.

Creativity does not come out of nowhere. It is what happens when you have seen many ways of doing things in various scenarios, and pattern-matching exploratively. What common helpful features might certain tasks share? What might be the load-bearing structure? Pattern-matching is a skill you can learn by constantly considering and testing possible patterns. If you need to cut corrugated sheet metal and have no shears, you might try snipping just a good amount and manually tearing off the rest, like paper. If you need to start cutting an internal square or circle in sheet metal, and you have no better tool, you might drill a few holes in the middle and use one of the tips on your aviation snips to tear open a larger hole first, like tearing a hole in cling wrap with your finger. If you have no chisel, you might hammer a screwdriver instead. The more books you’ve read, the more creative a writer you become: you know you can repeat the same idea in different ways to demonstrate a deeper point, or organise sections roughly in certain ways so that concepts are easier to track. The more songs you’ve listened to, the more creative a musician you become: you understand what kinds of sounds are possible, what kind of sound you want. A novice plumber is terrible at improvising because he hasn’t yet seen enough. He must start with the standard method that definitely works, following rules slowly and literally, and build from there into automaticity.

Speed

Often, instructors provide crude instructions such as “don’t overthink!” or “go faster!”, but it is easy to obey too literally. Thinking too little is also catastrophic. Thinking hard is not the problem; being stalled because you do not understand the important constraints is the problem. Similarly, going faster should not mean rushing. It is about removing unnecessary time sinks that don’t affect the quality of the output: context switches, bad tools, poor planning. Sometimes I would see students finish before me and feel like I was falling behind, but then I would notice that they compromised far too much quality to get there. I eventually became much faster at sheet metal, for instance, because I initially took that extra time to try to get things right, even if I looked ridiculously slow.

Not being overly invested in what others think, say or do is an excellent skill to have. An inability to do this can sometimes be due to insecurity that results from not having anything else going on in your life. Counterintuitively, it is psychologically helpful to have multiple other skills or projects that you’re working on so you feel less pressure for plumbing to work out. This way, you can feel comfortable being slower initially and outpacing everyone in the long run. Prudent momentum is good, and laziness is bad, but so is rushing. It is important to remember that most people rush into things out of desperation and end up with worse outcomes, even if they look better initially—rivets that are not quite straight, useless degrees, mediocre relationships, overpriced stocks, overspecialised apprenticeships, and so on. If you know your plan is better in the long run, it doesn’t matter if everyone else hits “milestones” before you do. You’ll also be less tempted to get sidetracked by the endless vaguely life/work-related discussions while you’re meant to be cutting sheet metal.

Coda

Many of these points seem like common sense to someone with prior experience in hand skills, but to me it was like walking around in a permanent haze of confusion, which is why it took me almost two weeks to figure out something as basic as cutting sheet metal with aviation snips. The problem is that even once I got faster with sheet metal, I kept failing to apply the same insights to other skills because old habits were so deeply ingrained. There was basically no fix for this other than varied repetition. I eventually outpaced a lot of the class because I showed up, paid attention, looked for patterns in my mistakes, tried not to repeat errors, and brutally tracked failures/successes. This minimum bar is now apparently impossible due to TikTok addiction. This also supports my idea that “natural talent” isn’t that important beyond initial acceleration: I started as the absolute slowest, and the only students that I couldn’t catch up to were the ones who had much more prior experience than me. If I were naturally gifted, most of this document would be useless. Instead, I came in knowing I would be ridiculously slow, trusting that I would catch up eventually, just as I have always done.

People keep saying that phones destroy our attention spans, but I like to put it more broadly: just like sitting down all day atrophies your muscles, phone addiction destroys our capacity for cognitive effort. Instead of reading books, we rely too much on AI summaries; this means we never end up developing a conceptual network in our heads. Instead of doing mental maths, we use our calculators. Having to pull out a calculator for minor additions wastes time. Phones cripple our ability to pay attention to boring stuff that requires time and effort. We skim just the “important parts”, but the boring parts are the necessary connective tissue. Phones ruin our sleep, which further dents cognitive capacity. And notifications can distract you at any time, because we no longer understand that phone calls can wait, emails can wait, text messages can wait, and no one will die.

As for accumulating tacit knowledge, there are no shortcuts. You only know it is better to drill in Dektite starting from the valleys (dips) rather than the crests (peaks) when you’ve done it the wrong way once, and realised that stretching it straight from crest to crest doesn’t leave enough to hammer into the valleys afterwards. You cannot keep everything in conscious working memory all at once. You have to rely on accumulated intuition. “Rational” people often believe intuition cannot be trusted, but even “reasoning” is based on intuition—what seems logical, what seems right, who is credible? You have to provisionally trust whatever gut feeling, instructor or method has the best track record so far. I am confident that almost everything I’ve written here has been tested against reality, either through direct tool use or years of learning other skills, but someone else reading my notes initially only knows that it basically seems coherent and concise until they test it themself. You update your intuition only when it is contradicted instead of building everything from scratch. The key is to not explain away contradictions: if you think your drill is straight, but your screws often go in on an angle, don’t blame bad luck—accept that maybe it isn’t as straight as you thought.

When I play musical instruments, I articulate very little consciously. Most of it is automatic and intuitive. I improvise melodies by simply imagining what might sound right, which is based on the many prior thousands of hours of music I’ve listened to critically. When we drive, we don’t run a complex mathematical calculation in our heads to know whether we should stop at an amber light. We can just tell based on the distance, based on the many similar distance estimations we’ve had to perform. In the insecure modern world, we strive for the certainty of a single “correct” method that can be followed by anyone like a checklist. There is no such thing. The vast complexity of experience cannot be faithfully compressed into tiny words without losing almost everything.

Eventually, in any skill, you accumulate enough improvements that your outputs are basically usable rather than catastrophically embarrassing, and you are familiar enough with the subject that it becomes easier to diagnose and repair mistakes. This feels like everything has “clicked” into place, although this is an illusion. Once you reach the point where you can produce usable results, functional returns begin to diminish, although improvement is always worthwhile. For instance, being able to cook like Gordon Ramsay is a fun goal, but is not 10 times more useful for ordinary purposes.

This does not mean lowering your standards, which is the reason why modern civilisation is flailing to the point that it cannot even get half of its trains running vaguely on time. Novices, when they reach the point of finally producing basically usable outputs, sometimes drastically overrate their ability, as they still have no idea how incompetent they are compared to the best. The reason my mother’s cookies are so good is not because she has a magically better tongue—in that case, no one else would be able tell that her cookies are better—but because she knows that better cookies are possible, and does not accept any minor excess sweetness, blandness or saltiness. If you are honest with yourself, you don’t even need others to give you feedback on whether your singing is angelic, cookies are delicious, or rivets are straight. Their compliments simply become confirmation of what you already know. (And if you don’t get compliments, I guarantee you’re fooling yourself. People are very generous with compliments when you’re actually good—too generous, actually, to the point that I constantly have to ignore them in favour of my own brutal standards.)

Of course, you cannot keep deferring completion forever in pursuit of perfection—if the rivets are straight enough that they look basically pleasant, you have to move on and try to do better next time instead. Say it’s only a 7/10, but that’s okay for now. Otherwise you’ll end up only practising straight rivets and never developing any practical ability. There is something to be said about aiming for the stars (the impossible standard) but being happy you landed on the moon (your actual worth).

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