Play it again, old man
Today I had a 5% design interview for a mech subject. And, as is typical of groupwork assignments, there were several gaping black holes within our efforts.
The interview consisted of us sitting before a panel of 4 academics who proceeded to drag us over hot coals about every nuance of the design in order to ascertain exactly how our contraption planned to work. As nobody was yet 100% in agreement on how each nut, bolt, and idea all went together, there were some conflicting explanations thrown around the room, and suffice to say, ‘working’ was not one of the things on the list of functions of our device.
Our task is to design a dustiness test rig that complies with two sets of standards – AS 4156.6 and IS EN15051. And the solution to the problem we have been working on has genuinely been plaguing me for weeks.
One of the things I was finding difficult to come to terms with was how to implement an interchangeable drum into our device so that it could function within the parameters of both the standards. Of course, there are dozens of solutions to the problem and I could have picked any one and been done with it. But up until this evening, all the suggestions that have been tossed around involved some sort of contraption or mechanism that just added to the overall complexity of the device by requiring custom machining and painful CAD modelling.
Now, I’m a big believer in the ‘elegant solution’. I can probably explain this best by directing you to Euler’s Identity:
Euler's Identity
Whilst not a solution to any problem per say, it is an incredibly elegant statement that manages to link 5 fundamental mathematical constants using three basic arithmetic operations. So it is the uncomplicated, yet obvious-in-hindsight solution that I like, and one that can often be obtained by taking the most basic approach.
Keeping it simple does not mean just using the first idea that comes into your head, but the process should generally be quicker versus a more complicated design. In the past I have often not realised this from the outset and gone down the arduous task of trying to design something complicated directly in the CAD program itself (a task which, in my opinion, should rarely be undertaken).
The last time this happened was at my old job. I spent several days mulling over something that was not going to work, before finally cracking the shits one midday and going to lie on a park bench somewhere in the middle of Redfern. Many great minds had lay here before me, and their ideas permeated the fabric of my imagination and provided me with a solution that was simple but functional. By that afternoon, I had a draft modelled and ready to show the boss, who approved.
This time, however, I was running low on motivation. ‘Designers block’, if you allow me to liken the process to writing, seemed to cloud my head and block the way to the solution. I could feel it in there, like a lone tablet in a pill jar filled with cotton wool, yes, it was in there somewhere but it had to be prised out. In these circumstances, further measures were needed. So I did what I knew best.
I went and talked to Dad.
My old man probably couldn’t program a microcontroller to save his life, but he could engineer his way out of anything with a pen and a notepad. He’s a bit of a ‘back of the napkin’ type guy who, unlike myself, has learnt more from experience than from textbooks. When I told him about my problem, the first words he said were “there’s a very simple way to do that”. And that was that. Within 15 minutes we’d sketched out a design that would work. The problem was gone, I ate a meat pie, and went home a happy man.
What’s the moral of the story? Well, it’s the first of two conclusions that I reached in my professional engineering work experience report: ‘Keep it simple, stupid’. What was the second conclusion? ‘Measure twice, cut once’.
But that’s a story for another day.
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