The Dumbest Engineer I ever met!

mramos1 said:

Thank God the blades are so close on the meat cutters. Worst case he looses 1/64" of a finger.

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I don't think we are talking about your deli meat slicers here! I think we're talking about meat bandsaws.

Guess I was thinking about the people in the front of the meat department/deli. I guess a large piece of meat requires a large saw.

I have two bandsaws and they will remove a finger but you will have to be persistant.

Metal one will be cleaner if you feed it slow. The wood bladed, well, nasty teeth on it. Either way, I respect all my tools and have all my fingers.

How else can you cut your PCBs?

How else can you cut your PCBs?

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A shear provides clear ready to use edges.

In woodworking the two to watch out for are the jointer and surface planer. They turn flesh to burger. With a TS or BS you can ice the missing part and have it reattached after you finsh the project.

I shared an office with a mechanical engineer. One day I saw him designing gears on the cad system and he was making various radial arrays for different size meshing gears using the same tooth. I mentioned that there was a thing with a pitch circle and a pressure angle or something and I didn't think you were suppose to do it that way. He ignored me.

A few weeks later he hooked up the new gears, brought some people in the room, switched the machine on and it went "war-RAR-RAR-RAR-RAR...

I got this forwarded email..

Man entered a pet shop, wanting to buy a monkey.

The shop owner pointed out three identical monkeys and said, "The monkey to the left costs 500 dollars."

Why does that monkey cost so much?" the man wondered.

The owner replied, "Well, it knows how to use a computer."

The man asked about the next monkey on the perch.

"That one costs 1,000 dollars because it can do everything the other monkey can do, plus it knows how to use the LINUX operating system."

Naturally, the startled customer asked about the third monkey.

"That one costs 2,000 dollars."

" And what does that one do?" the man asked.

The owner replied, "To be honest, I've never seen him doing anything, but the other two call him boss!"

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duffy said:

I shared an office with a mechanical engineer. One day I saw him designing gears on the cad system and he was making various radial arrays for different size meshing gears using the same tooth. I mentioned that there was a thing with a pitch circle and a pressure angle or something and I didn't think you were suppose to do it that way. He ignored me.

A few weeks later he hooked up the new gears, brought some people in the room, switched the machine on and it went "war-RAR-RAR-RAR-RAR...

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Don't you guys have design reviews before going for a build? Skipping this step is an expensive way to do business, even for proto builds.

Well I repair industrial gearbox's for a job, I've had 7 mixer gearboxs come after they all failed. It turns out an enginear re-designed some bearings that run on a shaft with 2 helical gears running with the same hand on the gear teeth, he used ball bearings to replace the tapered bearings. The only thing to stop the end thrust on the shaft is a 65mm external circlip. Every failure was due to the circlip failing and the average repair cost is close to 30K each box. I did offer a design change but the repsonse i got was ' i'm the enginear your only a fitter so what would you know'

Well they do have 12 of those mixer box's and I'm not allowed to change the design so looks like a nice bonus coming my way repairing these gearboxs all the time.

cheers Bryan

Don't you guys have design reviews before going for a build?

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See the post above about the most expensive monkey.

duffy said:

See the post above about the most expensive monkey.

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Okay, I get it...

The first engineer I worked for in an early job out of school was named Doug. Doug had been there a few years already, and he lasted another year before being shown the door. I was too damn busy to observe the politics at the time, so had no idea why he got the boot.

It's a year later, and work has slacked off some. I find myself in the loft with Doug's replacement, John, carrying boxes downstairs to the dumpster. Heavy boxes, filled with blank circuit boards. At the end of all this tote-n-toss, I ask where all the bare boards came from. I am told that these were all the boards Doug had mis-designed, boards that others had mis-designed but he failed to verify, and boards that were fabbed improperly but Doug had signed off without inspecting first. Then john cheerfully informs me he got promoted internally to Doug's job because he pointed out the cost of the bad boards could be written off in taxes.

Later!
kenjj

Speaking of Design Reviews;

Well this fellow was not dumb, and I don't recall ever meeting a real dumb one.
Anyways, We had this newb eng, straight out of school and he scheduled his first design review. He never anticipated the onslaught of questions that fell upon his pleabian ears. I could swear he was going to anoint his britches as I watched him shake. Question after question, he tried to answer one question, then the next question came. He kept pulling overheads out, one after another.

The whole thing was going bad for this guy. He had not even assigned a note taker, and he was beyond flustered. The project eng suddenly yelled "Stop!" "This meeting is chaos", and he got up and stormed out of the meeting. Poor guy must of thought he was fired. He later got some pointers on running a meeting and rescheduled. Second go around went a little better.

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Moral of the story. It is best to sit in a few design reviews before you have your own. It is a humbling experience for the unprepaired.

bryan1 said:

Well they do have 12 of those mixer box's and I'm not allowed to change the design so looks like a nice bonus coming my way repairing these gearboxs all the time.

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Similar things happen in TV design as well

Generally it's a BAD design choice to put resistors in series (or even in parallel), commonly this is done for the startup resistor in the PSU (one goes O/C and it oesn't startup), or the 'collector current simulation resistor' (one goes O/C and the PSU self-destructs).

I've been to many technical seminars on the launch of new TV's - and I always point out these design flaws, and tell them what is going to fail.

To be fair, it's probably not the designers, it's probably the production line engineers, who find it's cheaper to use two small resistors rather than one correctly rated one.

I had a really big (and long running) argument with Sony a few years ago - I had a nice looking Sony amplifier for repair under warranty, which was dead. It was rated at 100W, and looked really good - but when you picked it up, it was far lighter than you would expect.

The fault was failure of the heat fuse inside the mains toroidal transformer, and my reasoning was that it was because the transformer was far too small for the job. I ordered a new TX from Sony (which was £140!!!!!!!), and repaired the amp - but a few months later it came back dead again, this time out of warranty. I contacted Sony, and they agreed to replace the transformer free again - but I could see it would be back in a few months again. I checked the RS Components catalogue, and a similar size transformer was only rated at about 60W (and only cost £12), and a decently rated one was only £25 or so, and would easily fit in the available space.

I conjectured that the transformer had been downsized to save production costs, on the grounds that most people wouldn't run it loud anyway - Sony would never admit this, and the only response I got was that 'they had not had many failures'.

Nigel, I suspect you see it all and see the worst of the worst. Unfortunatly I suspect you have a small voice in the big picture (Not to be demeaning) but it is reality.

I also suspect Sony cares little about returns as this day and age has become a throw away society, so the majority of TV's sold find their way to a landfill when they fail as opposed to a repair outifit. Perhaps with the latest sets weighing in at $2K or more, this may change, and then your voice may be heard more clearly.

I have never liked Sony since they hosed me with the Beta VCR

not fixable anymore Gonzo?

mabauti said:

not fixable anymore Gonzo?

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Yes....it is a good night!

GonzoEngineer said:

She has the motherboard laying on top of the metal power supply!
Needless to say, she blew up all six motherboards. I guess we all know how she earned her degree!

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There's no excuse for that! If she is an EE person then she of all people should be aware of that precaution when troubleshooting loose circuitboards. Heck, I even lay down a rubber mat atop the carpeted bench to avoid small wires or solder blobs that may have attached themselves over time. I hope she was good looking to offset that maneuver of hers. If she's big chested, perhaps Audio Guru might have special tolerance for a "boob" like her!

A gorgeous girl exploited me to solder her PCB's. One night I asked her to hold the schematic paper in front of me while I was working. She took the paper upside down, so I looked to her and made a "turn it!" movement with the head. With a serious expression in the eyes, she took the paper and turned it, leaving the blank part in front of me and the schematic on th reverse. And maintained it for 5 minutes!!!!!!!

HiTech said:

If she's big chested, perhaps Audio Guru might have special tolerance for a "boob" like her!

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I've heard "big chested" girls doesn't get enough blood supply to the brain, hence the known results. Poor girls!

Menticol said:

A gorgeous girl exploited me to solder her PCB's. One night I asked her to hold the schematic paper in front of me while I was working. She took the paper upside down, so I looked to her and made a "turn it!" movement with the head. With a serious expression in the eyes, she took the paper and turned it, leaving the blank part in front of me and the schematic on th reverse. And maintained it for 5 minutes!!!!!!!

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Maybe the PCB was mirrored or something so you had to look at it through the paper from the other side . Or maybe she trusted that you knew what you were doing and she just did whatever she thought you told her to do.

I knew a degreed electrical engineer from a good school who did not know what 'solid state' meant. He also referred to every IC on a circuit board other than a microcontroller as a 'FET'. Op-amps? 'FET'. RS232 transceiver? 'FET'. Temperature sensor? 'FET'.