In my limited experience supplying parts to defense contractors and companies that produced “prototype” items. Not only do engineers not take the technician into account, they routinely specify obsolete parts and of course, doing so with the wrong part number.
Example: Buyer calls me for a part, I run a search on it. I find out the part they require is only produced for people in Japan and that the alternate part number is the one sold in the US. The buyer talks to the engineer and finds out the specs for both parts are incorrect and give us yet another Japanese part number. We do a parts search, we find out that the part they say they need does not exist yet, it is still in production and will not be available by their drop dead date. They get another quote from another company that says they can deliver it in two weeks. They place the order. Five days later, other company calls and tells them what we told them, including the little part about they would have to fly to Japan, receive the part, then fly back to the US if they need the stupid J at the end which only serves the purpose of showing it is made for Japan because the part operates on a wavelength that is not used here, anywhere as proven by the FCC.
Many (not all) Apple Macs are engineered as if the engineer was personally going to be replacing every hard disk, RAM chip, ribbon cable, motherboard, and optical drive in the thing dozens of times per day. OK the Mini kinda sucks to work on and the MacBooks aren’t as elegantly accessible as the old black PowerBooks of a decade ago, but their batting average is pretty good over the long haul for technician-friendliness.
The self-centering aspect is fine, but with too many Phillips heads the grooves are shallow and beveled, and the damned screwdriver keeps slipping out. That doesn’t happen as often with single slots, which in my experience tend to have straight sides. Centering isn’t the problem, in my experience, but keeping the Phillips driver in a barely-there cross-groove. IS.
Now I’ve got this picture of some hapless astronaut on a spacewalk cussing up a storm because you’ve got to disassemble half this %*!#@! satellite just to replace one stupid &*%#@%*!#@! little 50 cent part.
I changed the timng belt on a 92 Acura Legend. Coming from working on 'merican Iron, it was an eye-opening experience. I swear you could take the whole thing apart with two wrenches (I forget 10 and 12 mm or 12 and 14mm) and yet EVERY sub-system had it’s own style bolt. If you removed 4 of 6 bolts and bolt #5 suddenly looked different? Look harder, you’re removing something you don’t need to.
The waterpump was this wild organic piece, it looked like an internal organ. It used a rubber o-ring as a seal, and used the engine block as the back side of the pump. American stuff is pulled raw from the ground, milled off on two of four sides, and slapped on the block with paper gaskets that may work once.
From the ignorant technician’s side of things, I once learned two important lessons about replacing alternators: 1. If something looks like it’s in the way, it probably is; try removing it. (I was amazed at how much easier it was to remove the alternator after I took out the battery.) 2. When putting the new alternator in, before bolting it on, looping the belt around the pulley, and tensioning the belt: make sure the electrical connections match. Oy.
Do engineers ever take into account the lowly hardware technician?
Yes.
I had a Daihatsu Feroza. The first time I worked on it I was swearing at the engineers who had placed a screw so that it faced the the chassis rail with only an inch to spare so that there was no way you could get a screwdriver at it without taking the whole part off. After I’d finished doing this, all the time wishing Daihatsu’s engineers would all boil in a pot of smoking battery acid, I noticed that slighly obscured by mud and crud there was an engineered hole in the offending rail in exactly the right spot to allow entry of a screwdriver. More swearing, this time at myself.
I found subsequently that working on that car was a dream. I could have kissed the engineers who designed it.
The things I work on that fail get nudged from orbit then hit with a missile. I’d hate to be that hapless astronaut too.
I meant, I changed fields so I’m no longer constrained by sales idiots and things aren’t built until they’re ready.
I’m afraid the educational system is worse than you think.
On the machinist’s board I frequent, someone once posted a link to the Havard University’s mechanical engineering program. They had to take, IIRC, one semester of machine shop, and it was your standard credit course, not like some where you have to take an extra lab course as well. The shop course had the projects assignments, along with the blueprints, posted on the web page. Now, given that the students had so little time in the class (if the class was one hour a day, then they’d barely have time to get their machines set up, before they had to start cleaning up), this is understandable, but the projects they were given were shit.
The one that I remember was a brake drum puller. The first problem I see with this, is that a brake drum puller is something that 99% of Harvard mechanical engineering graduates are never going to see again. It was also so simply designed, that it would not give them any fundamentals of anything, save, perhaps, how levers work. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that if you actually get accepted to Harvard as part of their mechanical engineering program, you already have an understanding of how levers work. The next problem with the plans were that they called for you to use non-standard materials. I don’t mean that they used beryllium, when ordinary carbon steel would do. Nope. They used steel which was of some kind of oddball thickness (say .260) and then ground it down to .250!
I realize that you’ve got to cram so much into people’s heads these days that you’ve got to limit what all you can teach them, so holding them to one course of machine shop is an understandable (if somewhat shortsighted) choice. But, for frack’s sake, make the time they spend in the class valuable! Instead of giving everyone really simple projects to do, where they end up with something that they’ll just throw away and not take much understanding from, have the class work as a group on a project that has simple parts. Say, for example, a rudimentary robot. The electronics can all be sourced from a kit, but the rest of the parts, the students have to make themselves. No student will build an entire robot, but each one will make a few parts that go into the final assembly. Not only will this give them some hands on experience with the machines, but it’ll also teach them important skills like how to work as part of a team, and how a project can be instantly turned to shit because some dumbfuck screws up.
Unintentionally Blank, they haven’t always been that way. The Honda (yeah, yeah, I know, but Honda owns Acura) Accord I had was built so that in order to change the alternator, you had to remove the CV joint. Thankfully, when my alternator went, the CV joint was going bad as well, so it was a two-fer deal. My current Honda ('81 Prelude) has the water pump in such a place that you have to take off the timing belt cover to remove the pump.
In answer to the OP, not often enough – but sometimes.
My first full-time non-summer job was as a software engineer (operating systems design & coding on a minicomputer). My first visit to company headquarters included a meet & greet with a bunch of the hardware engineers. I learned that the company took repair very seriously. A brand-new engineer:
Was required to spend time on the internal hotline (the one the field techs called with problems) before actually being allowed to design something,
Was required to personally assemble/disassemble the prototype of his/her first design,
Was required to train the field techs on repair/replacement of the device, and
All field techs were told they could call the engineer directly when the product was new in the field.
Believe me, the engineers thought very carefully about maintenance when they did their designs.
As a side note, some friends and I started a company some years later that did custom microelectronic design. We instituted a policy that the engineers needed to hand-build their prototypes themselves (they couldn’t hand it off to a tech), train the rework staff themselves, and work with the guy who programmed the pick & place robots.
Their performance appraisals also took into account the percentage of their parts that failed final test and had to be reworked. After instituting that rule, the engineers had to really get to know the assembly equipment.
Phillips heads are designed to slip out.
Henry Phillips originally created these for mechanized assembly operations, where the driver is supposed to slip out when it reaches the intended tightness.
If you want a screw that is both self-centering and resistant to slipping, there are other designs to use.
Mom used to complain about wanting an oven whose door can be taken on and off easily. Yeah, yeah, they’re self-cleaning now, BFD. She still wants to see an oven where it is possible for a normal person to reach the back without having to lay flat on the freaking door.
I told her there are such things as “vertically hinged ovens” and, after showing her proof, she hummed and said “well, maybe those have been designed by someone that does cook…”
Given that it used to be me who laid flat on the freaking oven door to clean it, I’m happy vertically hinged ones exist. I’d like to see one where the door can be taken off, tho.
To me thinking about the people doing maintenance is part of the whole “think about your customers” thing. I’m used to defining a customer as “anybody who needs my work:” that includes the people footing my monthly checks but also the cleaning lady (who’d rather empty a wastebasket than have to grab a pile of scrunched up papers off the floor), the people who will at some point do data entry on the systems I implement or the Big Boss who will want a report now.
Oh, the water pump was behind the timing belt in this Honda too. It’s the same way in the my Subaru, and if you think about it, it’s pretty deeply buried on a modern V-8. When you get to the stuff right next to the explosions, it’s hard to make them independantly removable. But you’re also supposed to replace the water pump when you replace the timing belt. There’s a unitized chunk of maintenance that’s supposed to happen at 90-110,000 miles that includes a number of things as they’re easy to get at while the timing belt is off.
Alternators in crappy places? Well, buy a goot alternator (not the Pep Boy’s Lifetime special) and hopefully you’ll only have to do it once. It’s unfortunate, but it’s things like that which make buying the factory Service manual a good buy. (Often for $20 or so on CDROM off ebay)
Yeah, that’s why I threw in the “good companies” clause. I realize that one can be a good engineer who will be chided for designing something that costs a little bit more but is easier to maintain.
I used to run the R&D department for a manufacturer (U.S.) and was often the interface between engineers, tool room, production floor and the respective managers thereof.
A lot of what gets blamed on engineers should be spread to litigation control and bean counters, more emphasis on the former.
My last car, a '98 VW Golf needed to have the starter replaced. Fairly easy job, 3 or so bolts, and a wiring harness…
Except that my manual didn’t mention that one of the bolts is also a bolt that holds the engine to the front motor mount. :eek: Once I removed the bolt, the front of the engine dropped 3 inches, towards my face, as I was under the car (on ramps, chocked at the back wheels). I though for sure that it was coming all the way down, and my wife would find me crushed in the driveway when she came home.
Thankfully, I had a floor jack that I could use to lift the engine back up to replace the bolt through the new starter motor.
Brilliant design. :rolleyes: [I loved the car otherwise, and sold it off at 186K miles, 7.5 years after purchase]
I didn’t mean to come down too harshly on the engineers or designers, I have no doubt that they have to jump through hoops to satisfy the other departments. Judging by some of the responses though, it appears that we are pretty far down on the list of priorities.
I guess this is good for the company I work for since I can charge more billable hours if the customer doesn’t have a maintenance agreement with us.
But you’re also supposed to replace the water pump when you replace the timing belt. There’s a unitized chunk of maintenance that’s supposed to happen at 90-110,000 miles that includes a number of things as they’re easy to get at while the timing belt is off.