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Super interesting: > The largest, the 50,000-ton forging presses, were behemoths: each was the size of a ten-story building, and could exert enough force to li
by tra3 2y ago
Super interesting:
> The largest, the 50,000-ton forging presses, were behemoths: each was the size of a ten-story building, and could exert enough force to lift an entire battleship. The 35,000-ton forging presses weren’t much smaller.
and then
> Following Germany’s surrender, the U.S. and the Soviet Union divided up its large press capabilities as well as its rocket scientists. The U.S. dismantled four German presses and had them shipped back to the states
I wonder what the logistics for moving something like that across the ocean was. I know Soviets dismantled a bunch of factories during the war and moved them far behind the front lines...wonder what that was like.
- dimator 2y agoThere's an excellent video on these presses https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?feature=shared
- hinkley 2y agoWell when you have military supply vessels just hanging around in the area…
- tra3 2y agoFor context, I work on my car a bit, and the shop manual for it is hundreds of pages (thousands?). Now scale it up to a factory, maybe without manuals. Disassemble, crate it, assemble it 5000 miles away. Based on my software experience, I can sort of go in blind and figure out how a system functions. I suppose that translates to real world too..
- hinkley 2y agoThere’s a UX school that says that if the user needs the manual you fucked up. I mostly subscribe to that school. Mostly. It drives my family nuts that I will assemble a piece of furniture without reading the instructions. But the thing is with a little mechanical sympathy, and a well designed product, there’s only one sensible way for the parts to go together, and if you organize them right while you disassemble it (granted, harder to do when shipping overseas) then you’re good. Imagine you had a device where four hardened steel bolts held the critical parts together. It would be stupid if the handles used the same bolt sizes in mild steel, right? Someone will fuck that up and use the wrong spare parts or do deep maintenance wrong. You’d use a different size bolt so they can’t get mixed up.
- WheatMillington 2y agoYour viewpoint is rather naive in the mechanical world. OK it's enough to assemble a coffee table, now try an engine with 2,000 parts. Without a manual how can you set bearing clearances? How do you know how much thrust clearance there should be? How do you know which way up a piston ring goes, or how much torque to apply to a head bolt? Machines are extremely complex, and that's before you even touch electronics and hydraulics, both of which are highly complex systems. Simply moving large machine parts safely requires documented procedures, let alone order of assembly.
- kragen 2y agothere's a lot of shade-tree mechanics who have successfully rebuilt engines with thousands of parts. essentially figuring out how to rebuild an engine is similar to figuring out how to build one from scratch, which is within human capacity, particularly with background knowledge. but the guy rebuilding the engine has a lot of hints granted, he'll probably fuck up his first two or three pretty good without haynes or chilton
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 2y agoThere is a lot of stuff you can do when it’s pass fail. As a pro you have a time limit and you’re bad if you can’t rebuild in X hours. My dad will tell you I helped him rebuild a bike coaster brake at 14. But the truth is the only decision he made was to buy the repair kit. I got rags and laid all the parts out like an exploded diagram, we cleaned them or swapped them and they went back in the way they came out. I worked as a bike mechanic for two summers in college. Cars have manuals and maybe the mechanic you work for has them. Bicycles do not. You’re all shade-tree until you’ve seen everything a couple times.
- kragen 2y agoyeah. thank god for sheldon brown