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>In your story, Chuck is ordering parts sure, but the guy who designed those parts was a specialist in designing parts... Exactly. In the long run, re-inventin
by redrobot5050 16y ago
>In your story, Chuck is ordering parts sure, but the guy who designed those parts was a specialist in designing parts...
Exactly. In the long run, re-inventing the wheel is costly. Costly enough that Chuck graduates with his PhD, while the other ends up failing out and working at a machine shop.
Also, a constant criticism of Chuck's counterpart, Mike, was that everything he built was constantly over-engineered, and took to damn long. If anything, his machine shop experience hampered his ability to design or refine his design skills past an undergraduate level.
A semester of welding, lathing, and whatnot will likely not help a professional MechE, as easily half their CAD designs will be fabricated completely by machine. Understanding a precision machinist's complaints will not come into the field.
- nickpinkston 16y agoNothing is "fabricated completely by machine" like an ink jet prints on paper. I work in 3D printing, the closest to this fire-and-forget model, and there are still a lot of design contraints and optimizations that any engineer needs to know to be truly good at making parts. If you're designing shaping, molding, machining, etc. parts having an idea of manufacturing processes is essential to elegant solutions at low cost. The other way would be like an artist who instructed someone to paint his masterpiece from his initial sketch. A lot is lost in translation.
- gaius 16y agoA semester of welding, lathing, and whatnot will likely not help a professional MechE Real, actual mechanical engineers think otherwise.