Free design engineering book

wrote:


Nope, been at this job for over 6 years, left my more interesting job for more money and better benefits, and paid overtime. I liked the work I was doing before better but it was less challenging than I wanted. My first engineering job was the most interesting, we provided engineering service for other companies and did machine vision integration, there I did electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic designs. Our customers did their own typical work and hired us for the more challenging work. That company closed down their office in the city where I worked, the boss wanted me to come to the StLouis office but I got a local job instead, that's been around 10 years ago or so.
I would love to find a more challenging job with competitive wages and benefits. To sum it up, I'm capable of automated equipment design, building, and programming but instead of my employer utilizing these skills, they have me changing light bulbs and repairing hoists, but they also want me to repair automated machinery when it's down.
RogerN
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I work where we have engineers with the ink barely dry on their diplomas and a mindset that engineers do these things and techs do those and the twain shall not meet.
I keep telling my boss, "I live for interesting breakdowns". My way of telling him I'm bored. I miss the old job, gone in bankruptcy during the last economic downturn, they let me do things based on previous successes.
Hobbies help, you can use your creativity on your time.
Wes
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wrote:

Yeah, I know what you mean. I haven't been challenged by work to use 10% of what I learned just getting an AAS in Electronics. There have been some difficult breakdowns at work but the difficulty is generally not having documentation or parts needed to fix a machine. Friday we were working on a 2000HP drive, smaller drives just get replaced, but we have to troubleshoot an fix the 2000HP drives.
At home I have a CNC mill that I'm wanting to update the control on and a CNC lathe that I already did a control update on. Plus I mess with microcontrollers and do hobby projects with R/C, computers, electronics, and mechanics.
RogerN
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wrote:

so, why not get the degree?
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Ed Huntress wrote:

Also see: http://machinedesign.com/channel/basics-of-design-engineering
--Winston
--

Chance flavors the prepared mime. _The New Urban Cookbook_ January, 2010

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Ed Huntress wrote:

The notes and book are both very good, but I prefer the book. If you're interested in the connections between theory and practice, the book is more precise. There are one or two connections suggested in the notes which I regard as being unproven, although I have not found any which give bad advice.
One notable issue is the connection he makes in the notes between Saint-Venant's principle and the design of reliable sliding mechanisms. Some time ago I asked Professor Slocum to explain the connection to me, and my interpretation of his response was that the connection is purely empirical, i.e., it gives a sensible starting point for a design but there is no mathematical proof showing why it works. But this is not stated in the notes. In the book, the connection is not mentioned at all, and he quotes a few sensible figures, noting that they are just "rule of thumb".
Best wishes,
Chris
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By "the book," do you mean _Precision Engineering Design_?
-- Ed Huntress
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Ed Huntress wrote:

"Precision Machine Design" actually, but I think we mean the same book.
Chris
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Oh, right. Yes, that's the one I meant.
I can't find it in the libraries around here, at Rutgers or the community colleges, anyway. Princeton's catalog is down and the other engineering schools are a drive. But I'll keep looking for it. I saw it back when I was with _Machine Shop Guide_, but I didn't have time to read it then.
-- Ed Huntress
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On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 15:48:06 -0500, "Ed Huntress"

Ed, see if this search has anything close to you:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40898034&tab=holdings?loc=Piscataway%2C+NJ#tabs
Keep in mind that is for any of the four editions, you can play around with the terms some to narrow things down I'm sure (if you weren't already using this search...)
--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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Hey, thanks, Leon. I figured that Stevens Inst. of Technology had it but I didn't want to drive to Hoboken. But I'm surprised that the College of NJ has it. My library may be able to arrange an inter-library loan with them.
I keep forgetting about WorldCat. My wife uses it, and has full inter-library access to it (she's taking a Master's at Kean Univ.), but I never think of it.
I'll give it a try right now...Yes! My local public library can get it from CNJ.
We cheapskates have to learn patience. <g>
-- Ed Huntress
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On Sat, 7 Mar 2009 14:16:42 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
<snip>

It seems like there is always something to forget with the all the internet possibilities now...
I have a sneaking suspicion that there are electronic versions floating around the ether too. I found one download/reference to a pdf, but it had already been pulled.
I checked through all of my used sources too, they were all close to $100, a lot more than either of us care to spend right now :)
--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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wrote:

I'll say. <g> Since it's basically a reference book, this may be a clumsy way to use it, but it is available on Google Books. You can switch to "full page" mode and hit the magnify button a couple of times, and it's quite easy to read.
-- Ed Huntress
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On Sat, 7 Mar 2009 15:19:57 -0500, "Ed Huntress"

<<snip>>
I've done that a few times with other books and wish I could do it with a few more :)
It works a treat when you only need a paragraph or two to answer your question. That feature has sold me on a few books too. I've been burned a few too many times now buying books sight-unseen that I wouldn't have had I been able to peek inside.
There are some old (~1900's) engineering books available in electronic form. I'll pass along info (they are out of copyright, not hard to find) if you are interested. I've been downloading/collecting them as I come across them. If you use a decent "djvu" reader program they are pretty decent to peruse.
I haven't been too impressed with the scanning Google is doing. It may just be the pdf copy being released to the public, but the quality, especially images, kinda sucks...
--
Leon Fisk
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Someone here put together a bunch of books like that maybe six years ago or so and sent out some CDs of them. I have one around here; I looked at them at the time, but I haven't checked them since, so I don't remember what was on the disc.
That stuff is always interesting and it's tempting to do something with it, but I've never had the time. Back when I was with _American Machinist_ and it was in New York, we had the McGraw-Hill library, which contained the _AM_ library dating back to 1877. We had some great old machining books, many of which I've never seen on Lindsay or elsewhere. Of course we had the old Colvin and Stanley books (Fred Colvin was an editor of _AM_ at one time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_H._Colvin -- all of his titles are listed there), and all of Dick Moore's books, plus at least a hundred others. Aside from the Library of Congress, they may be the only copies around -- at least, the only accessible ones.
_AM_ was sold to Penton in Cleveland and I've never checked to see what happened to the library. McGraw-Hill doesn't publish anything like _AM_ anymore, so they may have gotten rid of them. I'll have to check some day.

Yes, and I suspect it's intentional. They're playing a dicey game with copyrights and they have a new project going now, in which they had to spend $7 million of advertising around the world to let authors know that they're engaged in an opt-out program, to settle a court suit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/books/04google.html?scp=2&sq=google%20books&st=cse
-- Ed Huntress
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On Sun, 8 Mar 2009 17:27:58 -0400, "Ed Huntress"

I can understand somewhat with stuff still under copyright, but why do crappy work (a good scan/photo takes the same amount of time as crappy. Turning & positioning takes most of the time.) with stuff in public domain? I've looked at what others have done with this using the djvu format and it is quite good.
For instance, this series of books is pretty good (Turning and mechanical manipulation intended as a work of general reference and practical instruction on the lathe, and the various mechanical pursuits followed by amateurs - 1850):
http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica01holtuoft
http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica02holtuoft
http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica03holtuoft
http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica04holtuoft
If you want a local copy to peruse, click on the "All Files: HTTP" on the upper left side and download the djvu version from the file listing. If you click on the djvu version directly you will get the stream, which is for use with a browser plug-in.
This would be the link for volume 1 for instance:
http://ia360939.us.archive.org/3/items/turningmechanica01holtuoft/turningmechanica01holtuoft.djvu
If you need a free djvu viewer there are a couple other alternatives besides what Lizardtech offers. See:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/windjview /
http://djvu.sourceforge.net/djview4.html
The latter set of tools can create simple djvu documents also.
You may find this listing of interest too, just don't expect too much if the original source was Google. The text is usually readable, but the diagrams and images can be poor:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=applied%20mechanics%20and%20mechanical%20engineering%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
For the Google stuff I've found that the pdf version is usually a bit better. The djvu versions seem to be based on the pdf and thus suffer from compression artifacts.
I think I already have some of Fred Colvin's texts. Take a look at this listing:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=fred%20colvin%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
It is a fun place to poke around looking for old books...
--
Leon Fisk
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    If the book is old enough to have discolorations you can need to tweak the scan parameters on each page to maximize the contrast in the print while minimizing the inclusion of changes from the stains and discolorations. This is especially so if you are scanning to single bit density (maximum compression possible), though you can get away with less care when scanning to color -- but the image sizes will be much larger and much more difficult to compress.
    I know this from scanning manuals for various old machine tools.
    Given the number of pages in a typical book, having to go through two or three trial scans for each valid scan can vastly increase the time the job takes.
    Enjoy,         DoN.
--
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On 10 Mar 2009 00:03:51 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
<snip>

I've fooled round with this too and tend to agree somewhat.
Pretty much everything I have done is in grayscale and only 4 bit (16 shades) via flatbed scanner. I just try and concentrate on getting a straight scan and correct the contrast & brightness after the fact. Always save original in some lossless format like compressed tiff or png.
It looks like the stuff I currently like is being done with a camera and then saved in JP2 format (which could be lossless). I don't know what Google is doing but with the current crop of cameras on the market I would sure try that route before using a scanner.
Take a look at the example I gave earlier:
http://www.archive.org/details/turningmechanica01holtuoft
especially the all files page:
http://ia360939.us.archive.org/3/items/turningmechanica01holtuoft /
Note this file, "turningmechanica01holtuoft_raw_jp2.zip", which is around 240 meg. It is 512 images/pages long. They are taking some pretty good sized images. From what I can tell 400 dpi. Some other decent books I have are 500 dpi. If I had a high-speed connection I would download the raw zip archive and take a better look.
This is a nice book/document in highly compressed djvu format and completely text searchable. The OCR engine being used seems to do a pretty good job. I can't see any good reason why Google can't somehow do the same with their project.
--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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    [ ... ]

    O.K. I scan on an old HP ScanJet 5p SCSI color scanner.
    In the past, I used the HP application which I downloaded for a Windows system, but recently got the SANE system to work on my Sun Blade 2000, and I find it a lot better -- both the xscanimage (GUI interface), and the command-line scanimage which is really nice for batch mode, because it can automatically increment the numbers in the filenames.

    Ouch! In xpdf it shows up terribly smeared. Going to Acrobat, it is a lot more readable, but shows print-through from the other side of the page -- wrong contrast and exposure settings.
    And I don't know how them manage to make it so xpdf (the free unix-based PDF viewer) turns into terrible smears. Has Microsoft expanded the PDF format? :-)

    And -- I can't view jp2 images. I guess that I need to download some more libraries and re-compile some programs.
    Hmm ... the only programs which I can find for jp2 (jpeg2000) have a .exe extension -- and the only source for them is for Windows, so I'll have to wait a while before I can do anything with these.

    "ddjvu" hits a problem:
=====================================================================ddjvu: [1-15108] Corrupted IFF file (Illegal chunk id). ====================================================================

    Well ... if they have to use an image format which is not widely supported, I'm out of luck at least.
    Enjoy,         DoN.
--
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On 10 Mar 2009 21:46:14 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
<snip>

See if there is anything you can use for viewing djvu from this page:
http://djvu.sourceforge.net/djview4.html
They mention a binary for Debian towards the bottom of the page. Also a link for a Java version over along the left side.
I shied away from the djvu format for years and only recently became interested. It does a really nice job on old books if done properly.
Jpeg 2000 (jp2) files have been around for awhile already. I know GraphicsMagick has support for it. Seems to me that is available for Unix type systems.
Some info/history and possible sources here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000
I only mentioned the jp2 files to give you an idea of how much data they are getting from their image taking. I am curious to look over that data. May just have to suck it up and download one of the smaller archives sometime and take a peek inside.
--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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