Ford's CNC English Wheel(tmLJ)

I can never tell if english-second-language people are always associated with leading edge technology to display diversity in the workplace.. or whether it just emphasizes that the brightest minds seem to be coming from outside the USA.

It seems it doesn't matter what field of technology.. non-US-born people nearly always seem to be at the top levels of advancement and achievement.

But Americans sure can mimic and/or aspire to be celebrities.. from trailer parks to wall street types, Americans got 'em all beat.

We must not spend enough money on education in this country, yes?

In 2011, 56% of engineering doctoral grads at US universities were foreign-born. At the master's level, it's just shy of 50%.

Those are our leading scientists and engineers. They're very highly motivated. The higher you go in engineering departments of large corporations, the more of them you see.

We've done it to ourselves, and that part of it, at least, is not a matter of how much we spend on education. But by letting finance run wild, we've made it far more attractive for smart kids to pursue finance. At the same time, we lay off engineers whenever there's a blip in the economy, and until now, at least, our corporations have threatened to move engineering jobs to India or China at the drop of a hat.

It isn't the teachers, and it isn't the schools. The technical educations available in our universities remain the best in the world

-- that's why so many foreign science and engineering students come here.

It's business's reaction to globalization, and a laissez faire attitude toward making obscene amounts of money by manipulating money, instead of by innovating things we can manufacture.

As a US-born engineer I can certainly attest to everything you said. I have certainly seen many classmates, and my own brother, do very, very well in finance. Also, lets not forget about lawyering.

However I am starting to see indications that some companies are realizing that there are big benefits to having engineering, manufacturing and marketing in close proximity. I think the tide is also starting to turn in the respect given engineering versus finance.

Well, that's why I said "until now, at least." I'm hopeful, too, that the tide is turning. I'm holding my breath waiting to see how much it turns.

I get e-newsletters from Science of Business on the reshoring initiative. They send me a pile of links every week or two to stories about business and engineering returning to the US from Asia, some of which I read. Although they're very encouraging, they still tend to be anecdotal and short on percentages.

'Here's hoping...

This is very interesting concept. Ford seems to be very proud that it belongs to them exclusively which makes me wonder if they intend to never sell the machines or technology. If that is the case, can the prototyping needs of Ford alone really support the investment that is probably needed to fully develop this concept? I would bet with the right actuators and algorithms, it could be made much faster. They seem to have simply used two off-the-shelf Fanuc hexapod robots to hold the forming tools. Purpose built hardware could be much stiffer.

I wonder when Ford patented that as I remember seeing something very similar 3 -4 years ago on youtube, now how to find it.

I would presume they would want to sell or license it to generate more income. While it's a neat concept, I wonder if it handles metal thickness sufficient to use on an actual road-test prototype. If it's for in-lab mockups I'd think an ordinary VMC, some structural foam, and then plastic vacuum formed over the quick foam form would do just fine for prototyping. Heck, car bodies are going to plastic anyway and they're injection molded.

Maybe the machine gets the metal close enough to hand-fit without much unnecessary effort, and then withstands casting a Kirksite stamping die?

Those are interesting thoughts, but I think we're going to have steel unibodies for quite a while to come. And Kirksite doesn't last very long stamping steel. It's strictly short-run as a stamping die material.

Interestingly, since rapid prototyping (addititve manufacturing) has become popular, Kirksite (the same material as Zamak) has had a modest rebirth, for use as an injection-molding die material.

But the structure of a steel unibody is going to be hard to beat for crashworthiness and low cost. It's not easy to make big gains in weight using lightweight materials. A good 3D structural design in sheet steel is pretty efficient.

Ford's method looks like it has real possibilities for making actual production parts, although probably in short runs for now. A half-million to a million dollars is not an unusual price for a production body-part stamping die. There's a lot of room for a new forming method to find applications.

And if you just want a material from which you can pull a mold, there are plenty of ways to do it already. Big gantry mills/routers carve out a block of high-density polyurethane foam awfully quick.

Really I wondered if the body designers used purely mathematical curves or wanted some free-form manual sculpting that would be digitized point-by-point afterwards.

We made a lot of rapid-prototyped Segway variations to try out before settling on the i2's production design. jsw

That's a good question. Until fairly recently, the curves were generally sculptural. An exception was the racing D-Type Jaguar of the

1950s, but we won't go there (the body shape was derived through equations based on then-current aerodynamic theory).

I suspect that it's now some combination. The freeform shapes are resolved into NURBS surfaces by software, so, at that level, they're mathematical. This isn't something I've studied or written about, however, so I don't know what the designer starts with. Probably it's still sculpture first Today's CAD and modelling software allow a designer to create their designs by eye, as pure visual sculpture, and then the softare converts it into NURBS curves for CNC and other computer derivations.

But the structural considerations are so important that I suspect that the designs are refined through FEA to achieve the necessary stiffness and strength. With thin, high-strength, low-alloy (HSLA) steel, a car body and the underlying unibody structure depend more than they did in the past on shape-stiffness and strength. Plate stiffness, or panel stiffness, is almost nonexistent in today's cars.

And, of course, aerodynamic drag. Where they start with that, I haven't a clue. The last I read about it, it involved lots of iterations and computer optimization. But modelling aerodynamics in software is still a less-than-perfect operation. They still make wind-tunnel models.

One of the best short statements I've seen about what is going so very wrong in our society, culture and economy. For extra credit, compare and contrast with the demise of the Roman republic and mutation into the Roman empire complete with bread and circuses. (SNAP/food stamps and "reality" TV)

Sorry, that's as far as I can go with punditry. You'll have to ask FOX News or MSNBC. They both think they have all the answers.

Or you could check with Glenn Beck. He's an expert on circuses.

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

This raucous musical comedy about greed, deception and self-interest was lifted from plays written over a century before the Republic fell. They are among the earliest surviving Roman literature and almost unique in skewering commoners rather than the elite.

Ovid described a frivolous life during the period you mentioned.

"Pure women are only those who have not been asked"

These details the many sins of the first Emperors:

It was illegal to use coins bearing the Emperor's image in a brothel, so customers paid with these instead:

I started reading Tacitus and forgot the bread part. This very expensive public work pacified the population with cheap North African wheat during winter:

"I, Claudius" is a more readable English version of the lives and foibles of the Caesars. jsw

Might be a good idea to sneak a breath in there once in a while...

Jon

They most likely start with sculpture and then use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software to refine the shape, with the artists hovering nearby.

Joe Gwinn

The big manufacturers are, of course, using computerized aerodynamic modelling and refining it all the time. But they're still building wind-tunnel models.

It's not my field and I have no idea what the limitations of the computerized aerodynamic modelling may be, but apparently it's something, and the hard part, from comments I've read, is modelling interactions with the ground. Mercedes-Benz got a taste of it in 1999 when one of their computer-analyzed race cars flipped over on its back.

(starts at 0:30)

That was 14 years ago, and they may have gotten it right in the years since. Still, they build physical models...

Thanks for the numbers Ed. The money for education was sarcasm, ya-know?

I keep seeing examples of advancements in all fields such as many areas of robotics and AI, medical/medicine, bio-engineering etc, where foreign-born researchers appear to achieve the majority of significant advancements.

It's as if American kids don't aspire to be anything but wealthy, whereas it seems that more parents from other countries expect that their children will excel at something academic, scientific or musical talent.

I think that domestic manufacturers are only recently beginning to accept that manufacturing by remote control isn't working out as they planned. They've been in denial for quite a long time about greater profits from goods designed here and made in China. I sometimes refer to the Jeep plant fiasco of decades ago as an example.