I love stories of first real work experiences. We all start our jobs with book learning and abstract theories only to run slam into the real world. My first concerned a bandsaw with a spring loaded tensioner. Every time I broke a blade, the spring unloaded with a loud bang and was quickly followed by catcalls and ridicule from all of my new coworkers. Finally a veteran tool & die maker told me the problem was the blade welder on that particular saw and that I needed to weld the blades on another machine. But I was not told until I was properly humbled. Sort of an initiation I guess.
In 1985, when Cahners Publishing Company, then the owner of Design News, moved into a new building the staff had a difficult time regulating the temperature. The HVAC people had mixed up the thermostats so the editorial groups regulated the temperature on the executive side of the building and vice versa. The execs got cooler and thus turned up the heat on the editors (literally), who then adjusted their thermostat to further cool the execs. The initial solution was to place locked plastic enclosures around the thermostats, but the editors--many of whom were engineers--quickly subverted the "lock out" and the cycle repeated itself until someone got the HVAC guys in to check out the system. They uncrossed the controls.
Some time back I checked into a motel while on a road trip. The weather was mild, but the room became very warm after a few hours. I went to the air conditioning control and turned on the cooling. The room became warmer. The more I turned down the temperature the warmer the room became.
I called the desk and asked for another room. When the night manager came to help me move rooms he explained that they had been having similar problems since the air conditioning system was upgraded a few weeks earlier. The wiring for some of the room controls had interchanged so that my control was setting the temperature for another room and visa versa. Someone checked into the other room after I arrived and felt that the room was cool, so turned on the heat in my room. I started getting warm, so I turned on the cooling in the other room. One thing led toanother, and I was roasting while the other person was freezing!
Maybe this would be worth a case by itself, but since it is similar in nature, I add it here.
Today I discovered the hard way that you can reverse a split capacitor motor by forcing it to turn bbackwards while the motor is running. If the connected equipment can overpower and stall the motor and cause it to turn backwards it will happily reverse direction and continue running in reverse until the next time the power is turned off and back on. I had seen this before (not knowing exactly what i was seeing) on larger motors of several Hp with failing capacitors driving pumps against back pressure, but this present incident is with nearly a new fractional Hp motor. Thanks to the folks at Brother tech support for educating me on this.
This incident sounds a lot like the one I had contributed where one of three pumps was running without power. There was a bad check valve and the other two were driving it backwards. In the case of the Reversed Power Switches also, the one blower was driving the other backwards. Just because a motor is spinning does not mean there is power on it.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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