What’s In My Bag: Cycling Edition
If we’re looking under the family “bag”, mine is of the genus “rucksack”. I cycle to work and find messenger bags simply too cumbersome (sorry, Carmen). They slip and slide around, throwing their CoGs about, get in the way of my pedalling and after a longer ride my carrying shoulder hurts. No, messenger bags are simply not great a solution for actually carrying things whilst on a bike. A rucksack is the only way for me to go; specifically, the species Osprey Atmos 25. Clamped nice and firmly on my back, relatively slim but variable enough to carry surprising amounts. Its only downside is? Transpiration. Despite their best efforts at aero webbing and vents, it still presses my shirt against the skin, and and at temperatures like today’s 35 °C, which would be… (Hi Google, could you – oh, you have already? 95 F? OK, great, thanks. How-? ), there’s not…
Carbon is just burnt wood
I’ve been casting occasional glances at other potential jobs recently and one in particular caught my eye – in the woodworking industry. Now if we were making small talk at a party, and you were being polite, you’d say that there’s plenty of engineering to be done with wood, of course – then you’d smile wanly and wander swiftly on to the canapés, thinking “hmm, engineering, indeed.” Normally, I’d be with you on that one, but in this case, there’s a peculiarity involved that I haven’t yet shared with you. The job is in Austria. Let me start again. I’ve been casting glances (etc, you know the drill by now) – in carbon fiber engineering and one position in particular caught my eye. The company designs and builds custom or low-volume parts for the automotive industry. All very high-tech, as I’m sure you’d agree. Except the job is in Austria.…
Emergency in Slow-Mo
It’s been lovely, warm, though humid and thundery few days here in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Perfect for midday ‘Mahlzeit‘ cycling to lunch, for grabbing a coffee, some wifi rays and working outside, perfect for stopping production. Uh, say what? You’ll go easy on me, I hope, for not providing you with news as it breaks, I was never cut out to be a journalist. There was an alas fatal explosion that claimed two lives at a chemical factory owned by Evonik in Marl, Germany on March 31st this year. The plant and its workforce produced an acid compound called cyclododecatriene, or CDT to its friends. Its friends are, among others, producers of the polymer PA12, a variant of the Nylon™ family, for which CDT is a crucial chemical stepping stone. The Marl factory is one of only four large producers of CDT in the world, so its loss has knocked out a significant chunk of global…
Anything For A Quiet Life? Working At An Established Company
Editor’s Note: We’re doing a theme-week (starting mid-week, yes) here at Engineer Blogs about how engineering roles change as the company changes. Obviously there are some differences in what an engineer is expected to do in a fledgling company versus a near-death company. Our writers will detail a company (or multiple companies) they have worked in and how their role fit in with their organization. Let’s talk about the principle of Established. The very word inspires… nothing. It raises images of crusty librarians, besuited commuters in trains escaping the teenaged family, judges in wigs, stasis. Yet those very images are perfect camoflage for the turmoil going on behind the scenes – and turmoil is interesting whichever way it is bubbling. So, yes, I’d like to write about my experiences at an established company. How established? Very established. My company’s founder worked alongside Henry Ford himself, supplying him with parts made…
Weekend Journal — The Doodle and the Truth
Editors note: I (Chris) gave up my usual weekend slot to Seb because he had an intriguing article about a touchy and recurring subject within the field of engineering. This post will discuss working in the defense industry (possibly on deadly weapons), a topic which we know can set off some emotions. We’d love to hear your opinion in the comments section, but we won’t hesitate to squash any hateful or unduly harsh words. Engineer Blogs has maintained civil discourse and we hope to continue doing so. Enjoy Seb’s article! One think leads to another, as they say. This particular though journey started whilst I was drafting my post about the SULSA 3D printed aircraft. The process of writing about the subject gave me pause. I had to stop staring at the keyboard as I did my usual hunt-and-peck routine; I gazed thoughtfully out the window at the forest hills around Heidelberg. A memory…
SULSA: Why Draw When You Can Build?
A little while ago I posted about drawings. You may have noticed that although I can extol their virtues, I’m not one of life’s great drawing enthusiasts. The less I have to force myself to sit down and work on them the better. Actively put, I seek drawing avoidance. One way to avoid having to deal with drawings excessively is, of course, to design less stuff. A good way of doing that is to cut down on the number of components you have to design in the first place. In order to achieve that, you’ll probably need new design and production methods. Enter additive manufacturing, stage left. 3D printers have started their seemingly unstoppable march towards the mainstream. Whilst true mass production with additive manufacturing remains a long way off, it is starting to enter the consciousness of businessmen as well as engineers (The Economist has carried articles on them like this of late). Proofs…
Parlez-vous engineering?
An article in the Guardian newspaper today drew my attention to a rather stunning online archive of drawings and sketches from the engineers who designed and built Britain’s railway network in its 19th and early 20th century heydey. I heartily recommend you have a browse here. Whilst that collection is certainly a wonderful resource, I have a rather ambivalent relationship to engineering drawings. Like butterflies pinned into collection books, they are a fixed, dead representation of what once was an idea fluttering merrily through an engineer’s mind. Throughout the initial phases of concept and the first wobbly-lined and crossed-out sketches, to 3D CAD models spinning and rotating on the monitor, through to prototypes, parts take on a life of their own. They grow from chrysalis to caterpillar, evolve before your eyes and then – they are ossified, sectioned, labelled and numbered like any other sample. Their drawings sit there gathering dust on the desk, yellowing…
“Simply” Wrong
This morning in a meeting, an account manager voiced an opinion: “well, you simply have to X…” Irrespective of the content, and of any thoughts merits of the words of an account manager in an engineering discussion, I was suddenly aware of that word, “simply.” How easily it trips off the tongue! It and its cousins “just”, “only” (and “easily”) slip so – well, simply – into conversation; they are so often that they are usually ignored. But they still affect the tone of the sentence, of the discussion itself. They diminish the things that we engineers have to get to the bottom of. In this morning’s case, it was a process: “simply insert it and tighten it.” Account Manager talk, yes, but do you see how quickly that trivialises the problem, without adding anything useful to the discussion? In fact, in the spirit of thinking things through, I would propose that…
Automotivation
Sebastian Abbott is a British automotive engineer living and working in Germany. He regularly writes as the Canny Engineer. Baffled, amazed and in awe would also be appropriate terms to describe his outlook on this engineering life. It is almost impossible to be an engineer much of the time. There are the days when you’re doing nothing but administration, getting tied up in repetitive or irrelevant meetings, when you’re yet again explaining the same thing to the same purchasing agent. There are the days when you’re being pulled in fifteen different directions at once, and you think, “Why am I doing this to myself?” One answer is, of course, the money. A decent salary doesn’t hurt, but studies have shown that a higher salary often does not lead to better productivity. To achieve that, to really get you up with a smile in the morning, you need motivation. I like the word,…