Tag: engineering

Tom’s World – 23JAN2025 – Rusted Floorboards and All

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

My 1st couple of years in engineering school (1966-1967) were with a slip stick. A number of years followed spent in the military and civilian employment before I paused my hedonistic lifestyle to complete my degree in Civil Engineering in 1975. When I started back in 1973, slip sticks were gone in favor of calculators. I started off with a $240 (in 1973 dollars!) Bowmar, by current standards, the equivalent of a current $12 scientific calculator. But I quickly gravitated to an HP 45. I can’t remember who I had to kill to get the cash for the over $400 price of the HP 45. I was living and paying all of my bills and food and tuition and books from my $275/month GI Bill and my weekend job pumping beer, shelling oysters and making Reubens at Smokeys Bar for a couple of bucks an hour.

My transportation at the time was a Kawasaki 500 until I got so cold one winter that I paid $100 for a 1962 Valiant with a rusted out floorboard that I covered with a stolen real estate sign to keep my feet from falling through.

Sounds tough but that was the absolute best time of my life.

In a Businesslike Manner

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After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again.  Okay.

And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration.  Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony.  Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island.  Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars.  Well, what can I say.  These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time.  But things continue to fall apart apace.  Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States.  Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.

But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state.  I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.

But I have bigger fish to fry.  Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago.  It seems they weren’t working smoothly.  The pump would get jammed.  So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong.  Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again.  Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work.  Nothing came out.  So now I was getting mad.  I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong.  And when I put it back together it didn’t work.  Nothing came out.

So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something.  There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve.  This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out.  And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled.    Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.

Now this was very annoying.  I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease.  With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality.  Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house.  There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.

I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven?  I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband.  Far from it.  The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project.  Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 29MAR2024 – Non-Engineering Engineering

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TomD

“I had to deal with the newer engineers that, in my opinion, didn’t have the skills needed to design quality work.”

Don’t get me started!

But, here’s a news flash: a just-out-of-school EIT or brand new engineer isn’t really expected to have any sense, just like a just-minted 2nd Lt. There are supposed to be competent superiors to mentor them through the know-everything-but-understand-nothing phase. Problem is that, increasingly, the mentors are non-existent.

I see so many plans where it is blatant that the designer hadn’t a clue for practicality, cost or effectiveness.

One of the my main gripes is that engineers used to be primarily involved with engineering. 90% of their time is currently used in government guidelines, government forms, government bureaucracy and government compliance.

I’m retired now but still have a few clients that I do things for on an hourly basis. One of the things is reviewing a US Gov grant for a public works storm drainage project to alleviate hurricane flooding. The multi-million dollar grant is coming from a covid money distribution to the State I live in. Other than being a legit public project, there is just so much wrong with that.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 10JAN2023 – A Civil Engineering Perspective

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TomD

I’m a Civil Engineer specializing in structural for most of my career. For almost all in-ground concrete installations, the nature and strength of the subgrade is more important than the strength of the concrete. Subgrade means whatever the concrete is sitting on. In other words, no matter how strong the concrete or asphalt, it isn’t any stronger than what it is bearing on.

I’ve never been associated with residential work but in commercial, government,, etc. work, testing the subgrade is very important. It should be to you too. If you’re spending a lot of money on asphalt or concrete in a non-controlled environment, for your own sake. please call a local geotech outftit, explain your circumstance, and get a proposal.

If you’re spending couple to several 10’s of thousands, please spend a couple of hundred ensuring it doesn’t fail in a year or two.

Research Into Non-Ferrous Alloys Yields a Truly High Strength Material

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When I was working for a design engineering firm, we often looked at exotic metals and alloys as solutions to chemical reactor material for highly corrosive compounds.  Nickel, chromium and cobalt alloys such as the Hastelloy B and C metals were extremely attractive for their corrosion resistance and strength properties.  Of course, they were difficult to work with because their hardness made them difficult to cut and mill.

Now research is coming out that alloys consisting of equal quantities of those three metals have extremely high strength and ductility.

“The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 kelvin, -424 °Fahrenheit) is as high as 500 megapascals square root meters. In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it’s a staggering number,” said research co-leader Robert Ritchie, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the Chua Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley.”

If you notice this extreme toughness measure is recorded at -424 °F.  This implies that the toughness number is not as high at normal temperatures.  Now this is unusual.  Most materials become brittle at cryogenic temperatures not more ductile.  But I assume the toughness they’re measuring is still at very high levels for ambient conditions.  A material that’s five times stronger than the strongest steels is remarkable.  Even double or triple is unheard of.

These alloys are very expensive and would start out being used in the most critical applications such as space flight.  But over the course of time these new materials will find other applications.  Maybe one day this material might end up in the beams of a mile high building or an enormous bridge.  And before you know it they’ll make golf clubs and tennis rackets out of it.

It’s gratifying to see that not all the physical sciences and engineering fields have completely ground to a halt during the Age of Biden.  Possibly there is still hope of our civilization escaping another dark age.