Life Before CAD and My Home Engineering Office Yet Today...

[ChazzC]

When I hired on as an engineer at Boeing in 1990, we had to do exactly that - go spend 6 weeks learning how to rivet a wing section, router aluminum parts, install wire bundles, etc, before we moved into our permanent jobs. I don't know if they still do that but it was valuable. I came to engineering later in life then most I hired in with, and had spent quite a few years working as a millwright and technician in various heavy industries, so I had a lot of experience working with my hands. Most of the new college grads, not so much.

At Hershey, the Process group did have new hires spend part of each day the first two months meeting with all of the production supervisors so at least we knew where things were (important in a 1,000,000 sf facility with numerous connected buildings dating back to the early 1900's) and who we would be interfacing with. We also met with Sales, Marketing, Finance and R&D managers so we would know them as we frequently would be solving issues on new & existing products and needed their input (even if they were wrong, they were right).


Charlie

 

[RJSakowski]

These are my actual slide rules.. My life long computers, never needs batteries nor plugged in. The top one i used in Junior High School. The middle one I used through High School. The bottom one I used in college and years beyond...

I started using a slide rule my sophomore year in high school in Slide Rule Club. My first slide rule was a basic Pickett 902 ES. When I got to college, I bought a Pickett N500 ES and finally an NR ES Dual Base Log Log I still have the first and last. Unfortunately, the N500 became corroded and unusable. I designed and made a custom circular slide rule for calculating the length of bar stock used to make a horse shoe based on thesize and shape of the horse's hoof.

When I needed more precision, my CRC Math Tables would give me five decimal places. During my later years in college, we had the privilege of using the Marchant mechanical calculator in the Physics department. which would give us eight decimal places.

I rarely use the slide rules nowadays. They simply hold a place of honor as a reminder of past glory days. My Casio scientific calculator in my office gives me 10 decimal places of accuracy and gets used on a daily basis. To get the same precision from a set of tables would require a 2 million page set of tables. In the shop, I have a second scientific calculator and I also use the calculator function on my DRO.