Not everyone has the money to throw at things like this little machine. I have worked on one offs that were multi million pound exercises, where you can afford to have the best of everything, but something like this one, most probably made up from what was in the scrap box, and which didn't matter which way the s**t was pointed, was perfect for the job.
Why use a sledgehammer to crack a peanut (or drill and thread an almond in this case).
Almost any qualified engineer designer/maker can fault almost anyone elses design, but who is to say his modified version is right for the specific job.
Having seen so many one off machines up ended into a skip because they never really competed with the manual way of doing things, I have lost count. Where do you think a lot of my raw materials came from?
I used to cringe whenever we had a new bunch of engineering graduates come in, all wanting to change the world within a week, when all they had to do is ask the people who do the job in the first place, and they would be told why they shouldn't. They seemed to be in a world of their own. Six months down the line most of them were out of the door, for wasting company time and money on stupid and uneccessary projects, and it was up to me to get things working smoothly again. Until the next time it happened.
Not everyone needs the latest all singing, all dancing, faster than light gizmos.
This one just doesn't need to go any faster or be any more complicated or different. It works, although not as efficient as it could be, but is perfect for it's intended job as it stands.
Bogs, I am neither a "new" engineer (I started working as a mechanical design engineer in 1973) nor "graduate" engineer (I grandfather the degree requirements by 4 days), just a tool & die machinist who "backed" into design/development mechanical engineering through the latter days of the Apollo program. I had eight years of "floor of the shop" experience
before I proposed my first "design improvement." About one-third of my "work" involves fixing problems that various companies have. About 80% of the time my "solution" comes from spending a few days in my client's shop, talking with the
workers, and letting
them tell me what the problem
really is (management's opinion is very often
wrong). I
always tell my clients which one of their
workers had figured out what the "problem" was and how much of "my design" is really that worker's advice. About 20% of the time the workers point me to where the problem "appears," but they missed the point where it was
caused.
Franklin Jones wrote the handbook on orientation and positioning of small parts back in the 1930's (
Ingenious Mechanisms for Designers and Inventors). I have worn out two copies. I (try to) steal from the best. My current copy is new enough that I have to work to find things in it (my previous version was so well worn that it would "fall open" to the pages I wanted -- just before it fell apart entirely).
If you take the time to study what other people have done, you will find that the optimum "feed" for "lozenge shaped parts" is a vibratory escapement leading to a ramp that is transected by a chute. This was determined sometime prior to 1934 (which was when a Department of Commerce text on the subject of orientation and alignment was published by a combined committee of the Departments of Commerce and Labor). Knowing these
facts have made me a "hero" on numerous occasions. Literally, you can break down object shapes into a handful of designations (lozenge, cylinder, cup, pill, etc.) and find an optimum sorting and alignment mechanism set from known (and proven) successes. As I had done the work to optimize an assembly system for the device used to sample "fecal matter" from "feces" only two months ago, much of this information was "current" in (what's left of) my mind. (It was a shitty job, but someone had to do it.)
Back in the days when I was a Boeing "shift manager," I used to "fight" with Industrial Engineering all the time. They would send some fresh-out-of-college type who would drill five holes through parts clamped to a workbench using sharp drill bits and time his work. He would then write a report saying that it took (say) 22 seconds to position the parts and drill the holes. I would require that he do the work
on an airplane for
six hours before I would "accept" his report. It was amazing how the "estimates" would change after such an exercise.
There are few tasks that can
not be automated. It took nearly four decades of (taxpayer supported) research and development to fully automate the picking of tomatoes (a project I have worked on several times). We now have a machine that will run up and down rows of tomato plants and pick a tomato at the "peak of ripeness" based on the emission of a certain gas from the fruit. This machine (which became commercially available in the late-1990's) does a better job of picking and handling tomatoes than a person does. Was it worth the effort? Hell-if-I-know. It was WORK that paid my bills (from
my knothole). Now that we have it, a farmer can purchase such a machine for a bit more than a year's worth of minimum labor cost and (almost) double his income from a given (but large enough) tomato patch. Even tomato farmers in Mexico are using these beasts today.
I spent most of 1984-1986 working on the USAF/NASA
Factory of the Future program. In this manner, we perfected: CNC machine tool controllers, automated loading and unloading of machine tools, applied adaptive controls to optimize cutting, and touch-probe inspection of parts. Please note that we "perfected" (and standardized) these technologies -- they had already been "under development" for 30-40 years when we did our work. Many of the people with whom I worked went on to "sell" automation to anybody who could get the government-backed loans to apply these technologies to their factories. 88% of the companies that did so went out of business within a decade because the costs associated with "full automation" were much higher than generally believed. The people I know who did this made lots of $$$.
I refused to go this way and tried to show companies how to use
pieces of these technologies to improve productivity -- or, as I put it,
augmentation rather than
automation. I made nowhere near as much $$$, but nearly all the companies for whom I worked were still in business (and making money) a decade later.
Merrick's first rule of design is that there is
always a better way to do something. You do what you can within the allowed budget when you are given the opportunity to do something. Someone else will later come in and make whatever you did better. That's the nature of life in the design world.
