Hands vs. Heads
We’ve had a few posts recently about jobs recently. Chris’s Weekend Journal said that degrees shouldn’t be necessary to obtain jobs (though they can help) and Sam followed up with a question about ways to establish your pedigree outside of a university degree. I agree with the opinion that it is harder for a non-degreed engineer to get a job as an engineer. The way I have often seen this structured is that the non-degreed engineer gets the job called “technician” where s/he builds for the engineer with the degree. There is a general perception around technical positions, validated by lower salaries and position, that working with one’s hands is less valuable than working with one’s head. People who build the prototypes are valued less than those that design the prototypes/ first articles. Never mind that the technician often needs to re-engineer around the engineer who may be great theoretically, but less…
Bring Back Manufacturing
Recently, there has been a significant amount of rhetoric by President Obama on how we need to re-establish manufacturing in the United States. This topic was front-and-center in the State of the Union speech in January. Additionally, President Obama has been touring the country, speaking at universities, businesses, campaign stops, and fundraisers about how we can boost our economy by emphasizing manufacturing. The President, thankfully, has backed this initiative with a serious amount of funding. Much of the following information is paraphrased from Manufacturing.Gov, the website detailing the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. In a nutshell, the government is looking to fund up to 15 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation in the next year backed by up to $1 Billion in funding. The pilot institute, with a focus on Additive Manufacturing, will be funded using FY2012 funds, meaning it will be awarded before the end of September. These Institutes will primarily…
She Who Hesitates
This week at Engineer Blogs we’re talking about your role as an engineer as your company changes over time. I’m lucky enough to work for a company that has a well established and successful product. We also have lots of specialized support departments that attempt to make the engineer’s life a little easier. But on the other hand we are still rapidly growing. The company has more than doubled in size in my tenure. I’ve talked before about the conflicts between doing the technical work or doing project management work. A company with a reputation and a good administrative staff can be a huge boon to an engineer but if you are growing you need to be careful you don’t rest on your laurels either. (Street sign photo credit) When I had to return something in my personal life and stopped by the local post office I realized how spoiled…
Why It’s Still Necessary to Build Real Hardware
CAD modeling, virtual prototyping, and 3-d printing all have their place; but at the end of the day, You Still Need to Build Real Hardware. In this post, I’ll share a few examples of my own hard won knowledge that no book or classroom lecture ever covered. The real lessons of the day came from some time in the shop with experienced and very talented machinists. I was doing work designing a socket drive to connect a steel shafted motor to an aluminum component. The socket and motor were both modeled in CAD, tolerance stackups were taken into account, and we had something like a .0025″ clearance between the walls of the socket and the drive shaft. The parts came from the machine shop, and like a little kid on Christmas, I tore open the packaging and started putting parts together. We put the mechanism (and associated motor) through it’s paces and…
How to be convincing
It seems like I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince others of my ideas. Or sometimes it’s my boss’s idea that I’m trying to get across to another department. One interesting thing I’ve found is that people are especially critical if your idea steps on their specialty. I’ll give you an example. A lot of folks where I work have pretty good machining experience. They’re very familiar with various finishes and also with welding specifications. If you’re presenting a machined part with some welds and a finish call out they will quiz you non stop on why you chose that material and that finish over any other. But they are a lot less familiar with various electric or electro-mechanical processes. In my mind the finish I chose for a machined part is just as obvious as what kind of shielding and sleeves I’m using to protect the wiring harness.…
Technician or Project Manager?
No one person’s engineering job is like someone else’s. I know many of the electrical engineers in this community spend a lot of time in their labs or at the bench. Being an engineer seems to be its own batch of challenges and opportunities but many aspects of the job wax and wane between a more hands on technician role or a very hands off project lead role. Despite working at a large company my role can be confusing at times. One would think with plenty of qualified technicians to work on the bench, and plenty more qualified programs and management folks to support the paperwork and planning side, that an engineer would get a nice rounded role. As in, maybe we could actually do our job. But so often you’re pulled into going to Home Depot to pick up that set of hardware that your multi-billion dollar business just…
When Failure is the Only Option
Failure is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s exactly what you want. You might start with one component that’s been well tested with the existing system. It can be a simple clamp or a complicated swing valve (like the one pictured from DHV Industries). You probably tested it out when it was originally implemented and proved you had plenty of safety margin. But now your system has changed. Maybe you’re sending your system into freezing winter temperatures or hot, arid deserts. Maybe you’ve got a more powerful compressor that generates much higher pressures than you’d been dealing with before. So how do you test that component? Most standards would suggest you take your max operating conditions and increase the magnitude by 50% and test at those conditions. That proof test would verify your equipment can operate safely at your max conditions giving you a 1.5 safety margin. But in…
Continuing Draw of Diesel
I talked last week about increasing fuel economy standards in the US and how our engine designs have been improving incrementally to meet this new demand. It was almost a year ago that I talked about the military’s affection for diesel in a wide variety of platforms. Well now it seems like the flexibility of diesel and the American consumer’s desire for better fuel efficiency is meeting somewhere in the middle. When Americans think about diesel they might have an image in their heads of 1970s diesel cars puffing black smoke everywhere or a smelly large truck. Diesel is extremely popular in Europe but their environmental and safety standards are different which prevented direct injection (ha!) of European diesel cars in to the US (like the direct injection of the Bosch common rail injector in the photo). Still the advantages in fuel economy with the models we’ve been seeing so…
Reinventing the Wheel
The internal combustion engine has been around for several hundred years and been used successfully in industry and commercial applications for more than one hundred years. When we think about cutting edge technology we tend not to think about things that have been around that long. And in fact, most of the design of the engines we use today have not changed substantially in decades. But that doesn’t mean the small changes we are working towards don’t have dramatic effects. (Photo via creative commons from Ranj Niere) The auto industry has voluntarily agreed to meet new fuel efficiency standards of 55 mpg fleet average by 2025. Yes you can reread that, they voluntarily agreed. So why? Don’t more stringent fuel efficiency standards make car design and manufacturing more expensive? Yes and no. Yes it make it more expensive, but manufacturers know that demands for better gas mileage from consumers will…
Sacrificing the Short Term
Most designs are a solution to a problem. But a lot of times you can’t always solve the problem the way you want. The ideal solution might require a redesign of interconnecting parts that you can’t necessarily change. Or it might require time to test components that you don’t have. Sometimes you have to pick the next design iteration because it’s available or works within your time frame. But how can you be sure you’re not sacrificing the best solution for something that’s easy? Sometimes you need to have an interim solution. Sometimes you do have to make the quick and dirty choice while still working towards something long term. I’ve had several problem child pieces of hardware lately and this decision has come up several times. Often I’ve been forced to come up with a practical quick fix. It’s tough when you do that to keep the momentum up…