Re: List Reborn

On Oct 16, 2005, at 8:00 PM, Paul Bowers wrote:

> My point here is that at least 50%, maybe 60% of you time was in first
> and second stages.

In fact, those first two stages are where most of the real engineering gets done. Where you trade off different design approaches for economic and schedule impact.

> Call me old fashioned, but I never grasped the concept of "fast track"
> and "just in time"
> engineering.

Does you credit. They're management buzzwords that generally work out to mean, 'Do something, even if it's wrong.' or 'ready! fire! aim!' The assumption is that people spend too much time thinking and planning and not enough time churning out something (anything…) that can ship.

> I see far too much double dimensioning, and one that really irritates
> me is
> dimensioning from a match line.

That and dimensioning from a centerline are signs that you have CAD monkeys and not actual designers. Your sprog project engineers won't have realized that drawings are communication devices, not cool cartoons to brag about to other sprog project engineers. Cartoons don't have rules because they're eye candy. OTOH, real design drawings communicate unambiguously and in an organized way. The way you know you're using a real design drawing is that you can figure weights from it and establish tolerance stack-ups so you'll know where everything fits. Eye candy looks like the part pretty much, but only properly dimensioned drawings show how to measure a piece so you can tell if the part is made properly. Your CAD monkey never walked down an actual installation to find why something didn't fit. They also believe that it's OK to scale a drawing to get a dimension. (The CAD model has all the geometry I need, doesn't it?). As a result your average CAD monkey can't dimension functionally, and all his dimensions are 3 place decimals.

> I really felt that if
> manipulating a 2D CAD drawing file didn't work well, then manipulation
> of a 3D data base model could only be worse.
A good designer is just as good doing either 2D or 3D design. A poor designer using 3D just has an extended scope for screwing up.

You think you're an old fårt at 50? Wait 'til you turn 60.

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania