Why do people ask me to sort out electronics for them? I AM A MECHANICAL ENGINEER!!! I don't do electronics. That's what an electrical or electronic engineer is for. When stuff goes wrong and I don't know how to fix it don't be surprised.
Why do people when they come for CAD training where I work insist of moving the monitors and changing the position of the seats and backrest? You are only going to be there fore 4 days tops. I have come into work this morning and found the chair at the computer where I work to be at the wrong height, the arm rests have been changed, the back rest has been leaned back, the monitor has been lower and the angle. I have had to spend 15 minuets sorting this lot all out.
I can live with people changing the height of the chair as that is easy enough to put back but the back rest, arm rests and monitor and are bit of a pain to get right again.
Tea break over. Back to work.
When I started working on the space shuttle mechanisms with no experience, fresh out of mechanical engineering school, my boss gave me the electrical wiring diagram for the orbiter landing gear extension system. He told me to study it and to explain it to him in two weeks. Good thing he forgot about it. Because it took me like three months. However, it was a great learning experience having to have to meet and talk to many people in the electrical, mechanical, pyrotechnics and hydraulic fields. I had to learn about standards, symbols, logic and specifications. It was a good thing that I did like what I learned because not long after I was assigned the rest of the electromechanical devices on the orbiter, like payload bay doors, external tank umbilical doors, vent doors, air data probe deployment, star tracker doors and so on. So, I eventually was involved in the checkout software development for these mechanisms, their testing, troubleshooting and repair. Still, the majority of the work was electrical for which I became "infamous" since a lot of the older mechanical guys I worked with and had worked on the Apollo program thought that anything electrical belonged to the "sparkies". Interestingly enough, only the discrete systems that went "on-off or open-closed" were entrusted to us. Analogue or variable subsystems like anti skid brakes, nose wheel steering, remote manipulator arm and so on were the responsibilities of the "sparkies". But still, the work was very challenging and interesting.
About the CAD. We did do some "Cardboard Aided Design" just to figure out how some of our mechanisms kinematics actually worked since they were so complicated. Eventually, we would have our Summer interns make some two dimensional models out of plexiglass to demonstrate their operation. It was so funny that one of the original orbiter designers from California was offering his personal credit card to buy one of the models because they were using a cardboard model still. Yes, computer models would have been fantastic but they did not exist back in those days. It amazes me how all was designed with hand made (huge) drawings and hand calculations and it all worked.
Edited by xrocketengineer, 04 July 2014 - 05:38 PM.
