Machinery

[The Penguin]

Those who loves machinery, share your reason on why it interest you. For me, it's about the moving parts. Examples, how something likes gears and control multiple things at once. How the designer found ways to make someones work easier. They way how machines can produce products at very high speed. I have worked in a lot of factories and seen my fair share of machines.

 

[Harrison]

Taking things apart was an obsession of mine in my youth. I had to know how it worked and my first apprenticeship after school was as a toolmaker.

Steam engines still enthrall me and it's kind of sad that we've lost a lot of those skills in the UK.

 

[The Penguin]

I do find it sad as time progress new technology replaces old. I find old machinery can be more interesting than modern ones that uses computer technology. Don't get me wrong, I find a lot of modern machinery interesting, but a lot of this depends on software while the old stuff didn't

 

[Harrison]

I do find it sad as time progress new technology replaces old. I find old machinery can be more interesting than modern ones that uses computer technology. Don't get me wrong, I find a lot of modern machinery interesting, but a lot of this depends on software while the old stuff didn't

Indeed, when I was a kid 'software' was the grey matter between your ears

 

[The Penguin]

I updated the video link for the video. If it not working, let me know and I try to find a new one.

Lol I will admit I'm a software developer and I love the job, but I still have a fascination of older technology. A few weeks ago I watched a documentary called "Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams" about automata. I will include the video below. I think you will really enjoy this.

 

[Harrison]

Saved for later - cheers!

I to enjoy the tech world and have enough programming skills to keep me entertained, but give me a broken lawnmower (for example) and I'm happy for hours.

 

[Turk]

I do agree that some old machinery can have a majestic and timeless charm, but as a guy who builds the new generation of machines, they are poetry in motion, to me. To pull together every facet of technology like hydraulics, pneumatics, servo's, mechanics, and tie them together with some well thought out software, can be inspiring. To build something that operates with speed, delicatecy, and precision is like producing ballet. When I see other engineer's works, it gives me a unique window into their mind. There's always more than one solution to a problem, and I love seeing their offerings.

 

[The Penguin]

I do agree that some old machinery can have a majestic and timeless charm, but as a guy who builds the new generation of machines, they are poetry in motion, to me. To pull together every facet of technology like hydraulics, pneumatics, servo's, mechanics, and tie them together with some well thought out software, can be inspiring. To build something that operates with speed, delicatecy, and precision is like producing ballet. When I see other engineer's works, it gives me a unique window into their mind. There's always more than one solution to a problem, and I love seeing their offerings.

Nice. I always wonder what my life would have been if I was an engineer?

 

[clg114]

My main obsession is machinery. I love machines, of all kinds. As a kid I was always taking things apart, much to my parents dismay. All my life, I've made a living working on machines of some kind. At times I've gotten in over my head because tried to fix something that was to much for me. I just had to give it a try. Recently I built a trebuchet and that was a blast! It even worked! It may sound strange, but I would like to build a machine that does absolutely nothing. Just run. The more complicated, the better. How many people do you know with a machine like that?

 

[Turk]

My main obsession is machinery. I love machines, of all kinds. As a kid I was always taking things apart, much to my parents dismay. All my life, I've made a living working on machines of some kind. At times I've gotten in over my head because tried to fix something that was to much for me. I just had to give it a try. Recently I built a trebuchet and that was a blast! It even worked! It may sound strange, but I would like to build a machine that does absolutely nothing. Just run. The more complicated, the better. How many people do you know with a machine like that?

Getting in over your head is best way to learn. Love the concept of a machine that does nothing. Although for people like me, I'd be pulling my hear out trying to figure out what it does.
My final creation is going to be a coffin based modification. Something that will allow my hand, middle finger extended, to raise out the coffin, as I'm lowered. The world may not know it yet, but I will get the final word.

 

[Nitro]

My world is a mechanical based one...I grew up with a machineshop under my bedroom and expanded to many other areas in the field of mechanics and design. As much as I embrace technology,there is a particular fascination for older equipment that achieved wonderful things with little electronics and just plain common sense. Internal combustion engines are my favorite ones,but I love a good steam powered engine almost as much. Often when I wake up,my first project is the refurbishing of something mechanical or maintenance of a machine. Speed on the ground led me down the automotive path and to go racing in cars I built myself from a very early age. Two wheeled motorized vehicles were a part of the ground based speed events,my first one built at age 13 out of scrap because my mother forbid anything on two wheels. My next mechanical junky event was at age 14 when I grafted the front half of a Volkswagen onto the rear half of a Chevrolet Corvair with a 180 horsepower Corsa engine with four carburetors mounted on it just because I could and wanted more than the 60 horses available on a VW at the time...it was ugly but silly stupid fast to say the least and a trig problem from hell for a boy...Next came aviation because they were fast and added another dimension to what I experienced on the ground. As Turk stated,looking at other machinery allowed me to experience failures and successes and to see how others tackled a problem often opens up new avenues to explore design.
Most of my engineering skills were just existing designs that were modified to fit applications outside the realm where the original designs were intended.
I personally designed and helped build the machine that cleaned all the raw engine block castings of every Northstar Cadillac engine produced. Have a Leatherman multi tool in your pocket? Pretty good chance the plier jaws went through one of my machine designs and my fixturing to get cleaned before assembly.There was the cam cover cleaning machine built for Toyota that had to place two distinct design covers onto a rack to be cabinet pressure washed after they left the machining area and entered the final engine assembly area. That project was a nightmare because the covers entered the cleaning area on a horizontal conveyer belt and had to hit a carousel vertically and blasted with one hundred pressure washing nozzles at 150 pounds per square inch pressure to clean them. The 8 foot by 8 foot footprint that was excessively small for the motion changes the parts had to do and the covers had to be able to be loaded in any position by the worker. The original engineer had a very complicated prototype that was cumbersome to build and proven a failure after it was shown to the brass. I asked to see the CEOs nice pen,then flipped a cover onto the floor with it to prove how weak the design was as it had to enter a virtual hurricane of water in the wash cycle and was that easily dumped off the fixture. Then at that job,a project came up involving the safety catch on a rail car that was how the traction unit of a locomotive was handled prior to cleaning for rebuild. The latch was very simple and only required one worker to use the tractor for moving and securing the work in the washing machine as opposed to the two workers that left the window of opportunity open to squash a person who had to hook and unhook the tug and set the safety latch. The tractor original design was a failure as well,and I used the expensive aircraft tug for the parts to build a more suitable one...after it was proven a successful venture to build,my company added it to their design offerings to others...there was an in house competition to name the new product...I chose Pro Tow as my name...it won the competition.

sorry for writing a mini novel about so little of my life,I have had my hands on some pretty serious projects along the path that include NASA,NASCAR,The National Bureau of Standards,just about any major university that can be found in the news and a studio microphone project that you have listened to recordings made on by many performers around the world.
Here are two of my microphones in action...

 

[The Penguin]

My world is a mechanical based one...I grew up with a machineshop under my bedroom and expanded to many other areas in the field of mechanics and design. As much as I embrace technology,there is a particular fascination for older equipment that achieved wonderful things with little electronics and just plain common sense. Internal combustion engines are my favorite ones,but I love a good steam powered engine almost as much. Often when I wake up,my first project is the refurbishing of something mechanical or maintenance of a machine. Speed on the ground led me down the automotive path and to go racing in cars I built myself from a very early age. Two wheeled motorized vehicles were a part of the ground based speed events,my first one built at age 13 out of scrap because my mother forbid anything on two wheels. My next mechanical junky event was at age 14 when I grafted the front half of a Volkswagen onto the rear half of a Chevrolet Corvair with a 180 horsepower Corsa engine with four carburetors mounted on it just because I could and wanted more than the 60 horses available on a VW at the time...it was ugly but silly stupid fast to say the least and a trig problem from hell for a boy...Next came aviation because they were fast and added another dimension to what I experienced on the ground. As Turk stated,looking at other machinery allowed me to experience failures and successes and to see how others tackled a problem often opens up new avenues to explore design.
Most of my engineering skills were just existing designs that were modified to fit applications outside the realm where the original designs were intended.
I personally designed and helped build the machine that cleaned all the raw engine block castings of every Northstar Cadillac engine produced. Have a Leatherman multi tool in your pocket? Pretty good chance the plier jaws went through one of my machine designs and my fixturing to get cleaned before assembly.There was the cam cover cleaning machine built for Toyota that had to place two distinct design covers onto a rack to be cabinet pressure washed after they left the machining area and entered the final engine assembly area. That project was a nightmare because the covers entered the cleaning area on a horizontal conveyer belt and had to hit a carousel vertically and blasted with one hundred pressure washing nozzles at 150 pounds per square inch pressure to clean them. The 8 foot by 8 foot footprint that was excessively small for the motion changes the parts had to do and the covers had to be able to be loaded in any position by the worker. The original engineer had a very complicated prototype that was cumbersome to build and proven a failure after it was shown to the brass. I asked to see the CEOs nice pen,then flipped a cover onto the floor with it to prove how weak the design was as it had to enter a virtual hurricane of water in the wash cycle and was that easily dumped off the fixture. Then at that job,a project came up involving the safety catch on a rail car that was how the traction unit of a locomotive was handled prior to cleaning for rebuild. The latch was very simple and only required one worker to use the tractor for moving and securing the work in the washing machine as opposed to the two workers that left the window of opportunity open to squash a person who had to hook and unhook the tug and set the safety latch. The tractor original design was a failure as well,and I used the expensive aircraft tug for the parts to build a more suitable one...after it was proven a successful venture to build,my company added it to their design offerings to others...there was an in house competition to name the new product...I chose Pro Tow as my name...it won the competition.

sorry for writing a mini novel about so little of my life,I have had my hands on some pretty serious projects along the path that include NASA,NASCAR,The National Bureau of Standards,just about any major university that can be found in the news and a studio microphone project that you have listened to recordings made on by many performers around the world.
Here are two of my microphones in action...

No need to be sorry. It was a really good read and I sure others may think the same when they get a chance to read what you wrote. I never got a chance to work on large machines like you had in your life. The closest experience I had was working with Lego Technic. My first experience was a Lego pneumatic set. I got very amazed something as simple as air can control parts. Lego doesn't make the pneumatic sets that often.

There is a motor you can get as well comes with other kits. The most interesting thing I build was an excavator. This kit comes with an infrared remote that controls that excavator. You can move the excavator forward, reverse, left and right. You can also control the arm with the remote. There is a lot of gears required to make everything to work. What I found was neat that Lego had a control to switch from controlling the drive to the arm by pressing one switch. The end results are having 6 control functions with two remotes.

 

[Nitro]

No need to be sorry. It was a really good read and I sure others may think the same when they get a chance to read what you wrote. I never got a chance to work on large machines like you had in your life. The closest experience I had was working with Lego Technic. My first experience was a Lego pneumatic set. I got very amazed something as simple as air can control parts. Lego doesn't make the pneumatic sets that often.

There is a motor you can get as well comes with other kits. The most interesting thing I build was an excavator. This kit comes with an infrared remote that controls that excavator. You can move the excavator forward, reverse, left and right. You can also control the arm with the remote. There is a lot of gears required to make everything to work. What I found was neat that Lego had a control to switch from controlling the drive to the arm by pressing one switch. The end results are having 6 control functions with two remotes.

Build this...there should be enough math provided to determine the ratios needed

 

[The Penguin]

Build this...there should be enough math provided to determine the ratios needed

very amazing

 

[Nitro]

very amazing

To hear the story is even more amazing as they still have not understood all it is capable of...

 

[Nitro]

A clock maker would have trouble duplicating it...a team has a working model of it in operation that is very amazing

 

[Nitro]

The Lego twist on it was off the hook in my opinion

 

[Nitro]

Invention comes from thinking outside of the box and not being stuck in any particular design fashion

I have made repair parts for wire winding machines that wrap the braided shield around the core conductor on shielded cabling you use daily...those are a masterpiece of engineering and fascinating to observe in operation at incredible speeds of production. On the same note,I built payoff machines that fed the wire used for producing new wire from huge spools to where the insulation was applied using a plastic thermal molding process...they had pulse counters on the shafting to control three phase electric motor speeds to prevent tangling and a disc brake utilized to slow or stop the spool in the event of a break of the wire or failure in any part of the line...some of the lines were 1,000 feet long with water cooling troughs to cool the molten plastic insulation before it was rewound on smaller spools. There were electronically controlled wire storage areas called accumulators I designed and built to store wire during a break or respooling event to preserve line continuity...they were row upon row of 18 inch diameter plastic pulleys on idler bearings,some fixed at the top and the opposing ones on weighted arms that floated to take up line speed changes or interruptions.
For about ten years,24 hours a day,I had a plastic injection molding machine that made plastic parts for wire packaging that was used to dispense wire from a box from the center of the roll without tangling...the plastic press made 4 units at a time for a total of 8 parts every three minutes...it was a fantastic job in the shop that needed little human intervention other than to load plastic granules from barrels to the huge hopper every three days,empty the conveyer once a day and load the truck...that job profited $8 per hour for about ten years...the shop rate for other jobs paid $25 at the time,but the runs were often short with an 8 hour shift with intensive labor using multiple machines and setups

I love high production...my first production job as a child paid $.01 a part to turn 5 polyurethane washers on a mandrel at a time in a nine inch South Bend engine lathe ...it took a year to fill the 100,000 part order number but I thought I was rich...$1,000 in 1972 was a lot of money for anyone let alone a 12 year old boy...every penny I pick up off the street is one penny closer to a million dollars

 

[The Penguin]

Invention comes from thinking outside of the box and not being stuck in any particular design fashion

I have made repair parts for wire winding machines that wrap the braided shield around the core conductor on shielded cabling you use daily...those are a masterpiece of engineering and fascinating to observe in operation at incredible speeds of production. On the same note,I built payoff machines that fed the wire used for producing new wire from huge spools to where the insulation was applied using a plastic thermal molding process...they had pulse counters on the shafting to control three phase electric motor speeds to prevent tangling and a disc brake utilized to slow or stop the spool in the event of a break of the wire or failure in any part of the line...some of the lines were 1,000 feet long with water cooling troughs to cool the molten plastic insulation before it was rewound on smaller spools. There were electronically controlled wire storage areas called accumulators I designed and built to store wire during a break or respooling event to preserve line continuity...they were row upon row of 18 inch diameter plastic pulleys on idler bearings,some fixed at the top and the opposing ones on weighted arms that floated to take up line speed changes or interruptions.
For about ten years,24 hours a day,I had a plastic injection molding machine that made plastic parts for wire packaging that was used to dispense wire from a box from the center of the roll without tangling...the plastic press made 4 units at a time for a total of 8 parts every three minutes...it was a fantastic job in the shop that needed little human intervention other than to load plastic granules from barrels to the huge hopper every three days,empty the conveyer once a day and load the truck...that job profited $8 per hour for about ten years...the shop rate for other jobs paid $25 at the time,but the runs were often short with an 8 hour shift with intensive labor using multiple machines and setups

I love high production...my first production job as a child paid $.01 a part to turn 5 polyurethane washers on a mandrel at a time in a nine inch South Bend engine lathe ...it took a year to fill the 100,000 part order number but I thought I was rich...$1,000 in 1972 was a lot of money for anyone let alone a 12 year old boy...every penny I pick up off the street is one penny closer to a million dollars

The only part sucks about high production is being one of those people like me working on the line. Some places have workers work like robots. Hate it. Anyhow, you have a fascinating trade

 

[Nitro]

being autistic made me work production like a machine