Maker Movement / Mending Things

I find it surprising that many involved in Engineering one way or the other have so little practical ability. The really skilled chaps (and some ladies too) take an idea and run with it, they make new items, they invent new ways, and turn out a useful item. Others do not seem to "get" the idea of the product they are trying to design, make, or mend. It is interesting to look at youtube where people have made videos of mending cars (and other things too) and the device has been to be repaired and come back still faulty or even completely broken. Take some of the electronic problems there. The start is a diagnostic computer that points to a part that is faulty, say a throttle position sensor. The dealer changes it but the fault is still there. He changes the throttle body (the other end of the chain) and the fault is still there. Then he is stuck, clears the fault record and returns the car to the customer (with a big bill) The trouble is that the customer finds that the car is still not right. He takes it to a friend who also has a car computer and he finds that the CAN bus has errors on it during driving occasionally. He looks at the wiring carefully (which is very hard as most of it is buried deep in the engine and dash, but still finds nothing. After a long time he finds that one of the windows doesn't work either, and module 157, the window controller number 3 has a faulty CAN transceiver chip which he changes and all is then well! What is the problem that was so difficult to find? It is that the original system design did not consider how to diagnose faults with the control bus on modules that were not central to the engine controls. It is that intermittent faults or very low rate faults in bus systems need complex automatic diagnostics to stand a chance of finding them. Every component needs a self-test routine to check operation and communication. Do they have them, no! Someone will always say "it is not economic for us (manufacturer) to do this". The garage mechanic is told "change modules until it works and then the customer pays". You will note that no one cares about the customer, service, or putting the then known good modules through the changing process back in the car. Engineering is being driven by the wrong goals. Brunel made provision for repairs to the chains holding up the Clifton Suspension Bridge without taking the bridge apart completely. It used to be automatic to fit diagnostics, in a sonar system I worked on once a long time ago, there were complete automatic diagnostic tests to every board in the system. If the light came on you swapped the board. Simple and very effective because this could be done in the middle of battle!

Hi Andy,


For many years I was an engineering manager with a well known railway signalling company, I always used to love showing visitors round our repair section where we were repairing 50 year old equipment we'd originally supplied. People outside the industry would always say "surely that's bad business? don't you want to sell them new stuff?" People inside the industry understood that our reputation rested on both the long term reliability of the equipment, and even then being prepared to repair and restore the equipment to keep that iteration running as long as humanly possible...


Cheers,


Andy

I'm involved with several preservation organisations and frequently take a big spanner (or other heavy implement) to some ancient piece of kit to keep it going (surprisingly easily: you'd think the original designers must have known people would need to maintain the things! ?). Latest piece of kit on the bench was a GWR signal machine from pre-1948 (using a manual from 1928!) in constant use with minimal maintenance for the past 30 years. Strip down, clean up, paint, back together and good for another 30 years!


Roger Bryant, regarding the tape machine I am currently converting a load of cassettes to MP3 using a couple of Radio Shack tape decks from 1983, still going strong, and the Sony hifi system I got back in 1978 sounds as good today as it did then, just need to sort out the crackle on the volume pots.

An interesting post Andy, particularly the bit about the BBC and SSL. Strangely I too worked there, possibly a bit before you, or you have met me over a 9K. You obviously think I am in some way out of touch with "the modern way" but this is far from the truth. Whilst one can simulate circuits very well with PSpice, it is not going to get one to design something completely new. It does not suggest where to start, or how to for example encode video at a low bit rate. I worked on a very difficult problem at the time, how to make a video rate A to D converter with at least 8 bits of accuracy and very good signal to noise ratio. I worked on audio converters with more than 16 bits, and excellent dynamic performance. The problem is not the circuit design, it is how to make components that are not fast enough or not accurate enough do something which they cannot do on first inspection. That is the engineers' job. I worked on chip design for Oxford Semiconductor, same again, we could simulate the silicon performance fairly well but the techniques to improve the performance require fundamental knowledge of things that are not built into the tools.


At first inspection pretty much anyone can do some electronic design nowadays, and probably make something which works. This is essentially the routine boring part which one never enjoyed, certainly I didn't. The interesting part is the innovation, and this is the part that is probably born, or at least developed at a young age. In some ways new engineers are overwhelmed by capabilities, you get large FPGAs, analogue components with fairly amazing specifications, processors with a few billion operations per second, as much memory as one can fill, and all for a very low price. What could go wrong? In fact everything is wrong. Take smart meters, why is the original specification so badly flawed that the products have to be sold with promises they cannot achieve? Why is wi-fi not working very well for many people? Why is the software delivered to me obviously faulty the moment I use it, the same with web sites, enter something unexpected somewhere and they go very strange indeed. I entered a postcode for address lookup into one yesterday with lower case letters, it said that postcode didn't exist! Is it so difficult to avoid that problem because it doesn't even matter to the post office! I normally estimate that it will take ten times as long to test a piece of software as to write it. So something which takes a bit over a week to write will take something like 3 MONTHS to properly test. The same for a chip design, test is a long and painful job because one MUST find the unexpected. On the 9K it took many months to make the automation work properly, and it wasn't finished when I left.


The thing that is important, particularly if you want to get more women into engineering is to concentrate on the innovation part and not anything else. Anyone (men or women) will already basically be interested in engineering anyway, this is not a career choice to be made lightly, because it is not well paid in general, is not suitable for leave due to children. A few years leave will make someone relatively useless as you know, due to the extreme rate of change of electronics and many other areas of engineering. Some areas may cope but not the leading edge of technology.


Engineering has never been easy, Brunel and Watt took enormous risks and killed themselves to make progress. It is the same now, engineering is a hard career, and you will notice that those who cannot do it rapidly transfer to "management", usually being very bad at it because they do not have the understanding of the discipline. You may disagree, but as proof I hold up the IET attempt to entice women, some are very good, but the number is low and there is not much interest.

Let's step back from this a bit.


In the 1980's I had a Mk III Escort and my wife had an old style Mini. I could fix them both. And I did. Every weekend. By 1990 I could afford a three year old Corolla. Very sadly 18 years later someone drive into it while it was parked and wrote it off, it was still starting perfectly every day, and I never had to fix it. These days I routinely expect my cars to last 15-20 years without requiring any work on them, and they do. Oh, and they use half as much fuel, and stop reliably when you put your foot on the brake. And don't rust.


In the 1980's I was an old school analogue design engineer, designing using a breadboard, a pile of components, and pencil and paper. By the end of the decade I was leading an analogue design team who had no components on their desks, but by using modelling could finally achieve the flat frequency and phase responses that we'd never been able to achieve before. (The SSL 4000 mixing desk may be iconic, but the 9000 sounds a heck of a lot better.) Now my son is able to record music on his MacBook using a virtual mixing desk which is more powerful, and better sounding, than the £250,000 analogue desks we were designing back then. And yes, around 1990 I was an analogue bore (I cringe to think about it now) who would tell everyone in the pub how awful digital audio was. Ok, digital audio was pretty bad then, but it was all about to change due to Moore's law and some fantastic theoretical engineering in processor speeds and software - it was my error to underestimate theoretical knowledge and the possibilities of change. (Incidentally, in the spirit of this thread, I engage heavily on a forum where brave people are keeping old SSL 4000s running all over the world, and I help them as much as I can. Good for them. And I'm very proud of having a small part in the SSL story. Those old desks would be silly things to put in a new top-flight commercial recording studio though. Yep, you can fix them easily, but they're noisy, distort, have poor frequency response, and - the big thing - the automation and settings recall was cutting edge in 1977 but really really isn't now...) 


In 1983 I was taught by good practical BBC engineers in my training that the highest frequency we'd ever get down telephone lines was 6kbits/s (and they didn't really believe we'd get that far). Thanks to theoretical analysis and modelling 2Mbit/s is now easy.


We are writing these messages on devices we can't fix (or at least I can't). But what I can do is have video conferences with other engineers all over the world from my office in my back garden. Which I do. 


Disrespect if you like the wonderful generations who came after us, who are solving real problems in the world in ways we didn't think were possible. And who in turn are inspired by the possibilities those technologies can offer; they don't need boxes of each value of capacitor, and 'scopes which had to be ceremoniously pushed around on a trolley (they can develop new stuff on a laptop, and that is really inspiring). And who use Lean and Six Sigma principles to ensure that systems don't need maintenance and repair, with the cost and down time that entails, by ensuring that they don't fail in the first place. Personally I respect them, it's a constant delight to work with them, be inspired by them, and learn from them. 


By chance I just came across this wonderful quote in a book I'm reading. (Note: Downloaded from WiFi to my Kindle. I love high quality, beautifully bound hardback books, and indeed bookshops, but this theoretical based technology means I can decide to read something and it's just there. If Caxton had had the technology available he'd have invented the Kindle.) This quote actually relates to scientists in a rather different field to ours coming to terms with change, but I think applies beautifully to us as engineers as we find our own skill sets inevitably become superseded:

"People need to be in the place where their anxieties are recognised, to be able to say, 'Yes, this is scary; this is hard,' and only then [] can we be truly mature, creative, strategic, and innovative."

Yes, as we get older we do worry that we're obsolete and stuck on a back shelf, and so it's easy to try to fight back with arguments that "engineering were better when I were a lad". But it's rubbish, and doesn't help anyone. The way not to be in that scary place is to learn new skills ourselves. I wouldn't dream of calling myself an analogue design engineer now, I've gone in a quite different direction where the skills that do tend to come with experience - and yes there are some - are useful, and balance the up to date pure technical knowledge that recent graduates have - knowledge which is far more appropriate to the way engineering has evolved. And as the quote says above, it's scary and hard. But tough: that's life. If you don't want to have to cope with change then engineering ain't the right profession. (In fact I'm not sure what is, subsistence farming perhaps? Not a profession I fancy though.) 


And yes, I do like looking at and messing around with steam engines, but I wouldn't recommend them as a mainstream transport solution, method of moving water around, or for powering industrial machinery. And I do like making and fixing things for my own amusement (and to make make a minor contribution to reducing landfill), but I'm happy to be perfectly honest that it is only in the same spirit that I like doing, say, very fiendish Sudoku variants - it's a pastime, not an occupation. And yes, I do get frustrated like all of us when software issues mean I have to wait a whole five minutes before, say, writing an email, but I am also prepared to laugh at myself about it - I remember in the mid 1990's when we had to leave the most powerful PC in our business running overnight to run a PSPICE transient anlaysis, which this cheap laptop could now run instantly.



What really saddens me is that the ideas below aren't just the thoughts of some bloke on a forum. I wouldn't have bothered replying if I thought they were, however unfortunately I find them endemic among a certain generation of IET members. Not  necessarily (hopefully?) the majority, but often those who feel the need to make themselves heard (see again quotation above). Our membership profile consistently shows that engineers in their 20's-30's-40's, the ones who are actually developing these incredible technologies, aren't joining the IET. Well, if they go to an IET meeting and after a few pints start hearing "blooming graduates they don't know anything, didn't deserve their degree, no practical skills" why would they want to join? What bright, imaginative, innovative engineer would have any interest in being in that club? Of course this is not new at all, IEE members could be just as bad, looking back this was the big reason I didn't join for very many years - the occasional meetings I attended seemed to have nothing to do with the real collaborative innovation and solving people's problems which is what had attracted me to the engineering profession, and which I was working in very successfully, and much more with discussing how whippersnappers might be able to become proper engineers when they got to about 60...it's up to us now whether we want to repeat that mistake. 



Oh, and for the record, I don't care, and have never cared, what degree grade graduates get, so I really can't get excited about grade inflation. The whole thing smacks to me a bit of sour grapes. Ok, I do feel for older engineers who find they can't get an interview because the silly HR department has drawn a line below 2.1s to make their CV sorting task easier, irrespective of the candidate's proven experience; since I've only got a third in my first degree (mis-spent youth, sadly not in an interesting way) I've been there myself. But in the end the companies that do that only have themselves to blame when they complain that they can't find the right staff. Companies that recruit based on what graduates have actually learned tend, in my experience, to do rather better. 



Anyway, I'm going down to my workshop to add a HPF capacitor to the preamp I've just designed and built for my home constructed electric bouzouki.


P.S. The comment about women of course is just silly and patronising. But that discussion's been had elsewhere on these forums.


P.P.S. This is the polite version of this post. I deleted before posting the one I wrote last night with lots of SHOUTING because it was unhelpful, and I do like to try to be helpful...


P.PP.S. Shame about this thread, I like chatting about making and mending things, but there we go.


Andy

The thread is not diverging, because the things being discussed are totally connected.


I will tell a story of me:


When I was about six or seven, I was interested in anything electrical. My parents gave me a number of "Ladybird" books which were then half a crown each. Of particular interest was "Magnets, bulbs and batteries", which illustrated a number of things one could do with these items with the intention of asking the question Why? A bit later I was given old radio and TV sets to dismantle, which whilst interesting was rather confusing, particularly the large electrolytic capacitors which connected firmly to the chassis. At the next Christmas, I was given a book by Ray Bradbury, subject building a radio receiver in stages with up to four battery valves. Obviously I was hooked, and all the rest followed on, from valve amplifiers through Amateur Radio to a career in electronics covering 40 years, interspaced with some heavy electrical stuff to add a little spice to life.


The knowledge I gained at school whilst studying for the Radio Amateurs Exam (Then a 3-hour essay type paper with calculations thrown in) and subsequently at university was greatly boosted by continuously making electronic items, and mending broken ones as they were found. It is very unfortunate that electronics has become so sophisticated and tiny because making anything with useful functionality now needs at least one computer and chips and other components really cannot be assembled without a sophisticated PCB. Even my interest in Amateur Television has been dulled because a digital transmitter is miles away from a sensible home project, although is available designed by a superb team for the  BATC and is available fully assembled and tested. One can make power amplifiers and converters for various bands as more powerful items are still of a size one can see!


Many items are made so that they cannot be mended, just complete subassemblies changed. It is disappointing to an extreme degree to have a failure of some piece of kit that is immediately beyond any reasonable repair. Modern youth will never learn because many things are virtually impossible. Somehow we need to encourage the "hands-on approach" to get anyone interested in science or engineering. Schools no longer carry out many experiments in Chemistry because the "H&S says it is too dangerous". In fact almost everything is too dangerous today, schools no longer have machine tools that pupils can use, sharp chisels are banned as being weapons etc. Just how are these youngsters expected to learn anything? Put simply learning is by doing, no wonder the only girls even slightly interested only want to be computer programmers, and there are few of those.


A few years back I taught farmers sons tractor mechanics in an Agricultural College. Even they, whose livelihoods depended on their machines, were really interested in fixing them. As to why or how they actually worked, well that was much less interesting than testing a tractor on a dynamometer or driving far too fast around the yard.


This is why I write about the University course graduates. They have missed a huge chunk of education, to the detriment of everything. Technical training is now at a very low ebb, not helped by the IET pushing women into Engineering for which they are likely to be very ill-equipped. What is needed is root and branch improvement of the training process, from primary school to University.

This thread seems to have split in two, maybe time for a new thread??

There has been massive grade inflation in recent years, so 25% of students getting a 1st is the new normal.


When I was a student, the fees were paid by my local education authority.  If I wanted a good degree, I had to turn up for the lectures and pay attention.


These days, students have to pay for their own tuition.  If you are paying £27000 for a degree, then you want a good one, and a lower 2nd just isn't going to cut it.  So if you turn up for a couple of lectures and can spell your name right on the exam form, you'll get an upper 2nd.  If you actually bother to study, you'll get a 1st.  Any university that didn't do that would soon find it had no students.