devices of unecessary complexity

AKA: Muntzed

My Fuji Finepix S5200 digital camera needs a new memory battery. It is tiny coin cell with welded tabs that is solder to one of the many circuit boards. The manual only list the inventory number, and no standard battery will fit in the small space.

I needed to change the thermostat on my Alfa Romeo. On every car I've owned previously, it cost a few dollars and replacement involved removing two or three bolts from a hose fitting on the block. On my Alfa, the thermo was i ntegrated into the entire housing. It cost over a hundred, and took 45 minu tes to change out!

isplays for a toy company. The bases would show the kinetic aspects of the toys. I would get a proposed design from their engineers, and come in the n ext day with revisions that would sometimes halve the cost with no loss of performance or reliability. I had no real motive to save them money, I just like simplicity and abhor waste. Most of my suggestions would be shot down just because they were perceived as cutting corners.

I don't think this was the case. It seemed that the company was paying for the displays. The boss just liked to see lots of fasteners, necessary or no t.

I haven't used it enough to remember how to calculate moments of inertia so I use the AISI Manual of Steel Construction and these for beam and column loading.

I studied other fields to learn enough to recognize impending problems and credibly convince the project engineer that he needed to consult an expert to solve them. I learned machining so I wouldn't make dumb, expensive design errors.

Companies that design with moving parts, like Segway, have mechanical engineers, but purely electronic companies may be lost when the occasional mechanical design issue arises.

-jsw

That's what I used to tell the young guys in R&D. Don't invent anything you don't have to.

Pete Keillor

Surprising how many appear to have extra-sensory perceptionin that regard. I just need to get close to them, intent on finding what is wrong, and having (only to misbehave again when I leave, in many cases)

Lazer trimmed can be even closer.

Gunner Asch fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Sorry... I meant color transparency film. There are still quite a number of color print film and monochrome film makers, partly because not all radiology modalities are digital, yet.

LLoyd

While I was analyzing the electrical problem in my 1991 truck someone told me about a shop that specializes in automotive engine electronics, so I stopped in to talk to them. The owner told me that I had become the local expert on the EEC-IV system by default, since every mechanic who had worked on it was gone. The Ford dealers told me nearly the same thing.

All I really knew was how the sensors work, from chemistry and having worked on GM's test stations for them in the 70's, the basics of spark ignition and how to use a scope. The Mass Air Flow sensor is a simplified version of the bridge detector in a chemist's Gas Chromatograph.

I saw the same hot-wire principle used on a Bosch injector pump tester we built to measure the uniformity of the nozzle spray pattern. I didn't actually work on that machine and can't give Iggy useful details such as the full capacity of the row of graduated glass tubes that measured each cylinder's flow volume. A 10 HP variable speed DC motor drove the pump being tested.

In Germany I followed the dystopian Sudden Death comic series, European equivalents to R. Crumb. One of their visions was that the "sacred electronics" would become the arcane knowledge of old guys.

-jsw

I've got a boatload of Canon 35mm if interested.

That wasn't one of the problems. The company was heavy on practice if light on theory, like most of the auto execs we dealt with. By the time I'd made Project Engineer and was writing responses to RFQs for capital equipment I knew what we could and couldn't do.

Then the field service engineer decided he'd had enough, and being the only single guy not let go in the last RIF I was the obvious choice to replace him.

I soon found out why he had quit, on-scene middleman in a corporate dispute is a task for a glib lawyer, not me. GM "was not amused" when our testers revealed unexpected faults. At least when I did field service repair in the Army I had the considerable protection of a Sergeant's E-5 rank and we all worked for the same organization.

-jsw

Bbbut, I was talking about Tiggin', wholely on topic on a metalworking group. Wouldja like to hear more about how I stuck the electrode and welded with it still contaminated? I purely do wish it had a HF start mode, but it's a scratcher. The copper-plated filler rod helps immensely, though.

Besides being tres cool, for something so wildly hot, steam is totallyunsustainableandwilldrownpolarbearsinmeltedicejustaskAlgoreyup.

I had it set all the way down on 1 to weld a 3/32" bracket. That seems to be my^C^Cone weak point. Determining the welder power setting. I'm now using much less power to weld and it's getting easier each time. I really should practice more.

How do you get the 6 logs down into the cylinders to burn, mon?

Making wood gas sounds like a really toxic, smelly, and very messy proposition.

I sit corrected. (too lazy to stand)

They probably have nice, easy, quick-reference charts in them, taking the sting out of the process.

Smart.

May?

Machines with intermittent faults behave perfectly when I come near them.

-jsw

So did HP. My early-70's 8555A spectrum analyzer is a masterpiece of both electronic and mechanical design. It even has a Magic Crystal for a heart

Then they lost their way on the scopes with keypads and a single control dial that took two minutes to change any setting. I have one because it sold cheap but much preferred their Infinium with separate knobs for each function.

-jsw

They were back then too. A company half an hour away would grind the Ruthenium oxide blanks to whatever precision we could afford. IIRC the non-standard ones for op-amp production line testers cost about $5 apiece.

Another company on the way to work made me a batch of custom thick-film resistors to match a laser diode to the 50 Ohm drive line at up to 6 GHz. I don't remember how much the Air Force paid for them.

What I meant was that they don't talk back...much.