Talk-Polywell.org

If you study the industrial revolution in any detail you discover the amazing story of how engineering shope bootstrapped themselves into existance, probably starting with Maudsley's and Wilkinson's shops in Britain and Whitney and North's shops in New England. making their own tools and spreading across the landscape as people who started in those shops started their own tools and then made the machines and engines that drove the revolution. I visited what is probably the last of that kind of engineering shop yesterday, the Watts Cambell Co. in Newark NJ :
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... c797a59bc7
It was like walkint into a time capsule. Unfortunately, the owner is very old, the building has been sold to a developer and all this will soon be gone.

Pretend I'm stupid and can only keep track of a single sentence at a time. What's an "engineering shop" in a nutshell?

It's a place that accountants, bean-counters and other associated maangerial/financial types think they can just go buy some engineering when they have an impossible project to fulfil, but got rid of all the useless engineers before that were just an overhead to their business and never made money for the shareholders like they do.

It's a place for those who say 'we can't find any engineers to employ' (whereas what they mean is 'we can't find any engineers prepared to work for the sh!t salary we are offering, because it is less that we pay the cleaners).

Sorry... rant over... it used to be a place where skilled engineers ran a business doing any sort of engineering that paid money. This is probably why accountants, &c., still think they exist. (OK, so rant not quite over yet... )

Betruger wrote:Pretend I'm stupid and can only keep track of a single sentence at a time. What's an "engineering shop" in a nutshell?

It is what the commercial world used to support as needed to generate technical ANSWERS before the government generated R&D labs came into being, sucking up what engineering talent there is, and started generating REPORTS. MSimon seems to think of himself as a one-man engineering shoppe. For all I know, he may be a great one!

Well.. Those two descriptions sound like much more sophisticated and valuable places than something like the fabrication shops (sorry no link) opening across the country. Yet I reckon such a shop and the homefabbing culture it promotes isn't worthless either.

Fab shops are where engineering shops go to get prototypes made. They used to be called blacksmiths!

I reckon they're an early step towards popularization of do-it-yourselfism. Which inevitably leads, IMO, to the kind of brass tacks pragmatism that engineers are born from.

While in Europe they are disappearing there is plenty of those shops in developing countries.

This sounds kind of like the sort of thing I'd like to do, with a bit of modern tech mixed in--modern fab lab with some old fashioned steroids shot in.

I used to fix all the plant equipments in such workshops while I was working abroad.
I once had the necessity to to remake the axe of an acid pump and made it in a local workshop. It was ready in 24H, at a cost of 20 Euro for the Stainless Steel and 15 Euro for the work. They even fixed the old one by welding the corroded points and rectfied it on a lathe.
I had 2 brand new axes for 35 Euro while to get a new one would have taken 2 weeks and 180 Euro plus shipping.

What is interesting to notice is that the presence of such workshops in a country is inversely proportional to the cost of man labour.
Unfortunately when salaries start to grow it simply becomes more cheap to throw away something broken and get a new one instead of having it fixed.
I wonder if 3D printing and similar technologies could reverse this trend.

For the non-italian speakers...axe and axes = shafts

I've run into this one before...something along the lines of the block sleeper column for the main axis being not optimal.

This translates from Itlish to English as The pillow block bearing for the line shaft has failed.

A funny memory. Thanks for bringing it to surface Giorgio.

And now back to the topic...

ladajo wrote:For the non-italian speakers...axe and axes = shafts

Whoops...

Check back when I get the new two-story garage built. "Engineering Shop" describes the intent of the upper floor. Light machine shop, wordworking, electronics, welding, data acquisition, and hopefully some fusion. Drawers full of hardware on hand, to include pillow block bearings, shafts (axels), pulleys, etc. A place to make engineering ideas into prototype hardware.

In Monte Pythonese, "One of the flay-rods gone out of skew on the treadle."

Could not find a topic (cant recall if we had one) on 3D printing's coming of age

DARPA also plans to include high schools in less complex challenges. Through AVM's Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) program, "we're focused on how to get the right level of tools out to the high school level" trying to kickstart interest in the technology, Eremenko said. The agency will deploy as many as a thousand 3D printers to high schools, and allow students from different schools to collaborate using social networking tools to build robots, go-carts, and other projects to compete in prize challenges.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/20 ... opment.ars