Design, Manufacturing, and Testing are the basic categories for all types of engineering.

It's taken me years, but I now feel that most engineering roles can be broken down into design, manufacturing, or testing. This is probably more applicable to hardware than software, but it's not limited to hardware. To summarize:

• Design - People at the start of the product lifecycle process, who design the thing to meet requirements.
• Manufacturing - People who build the product.
• Test - People who make sure that the product meets the requirements.

To some extent this is a narrow view, because when it comes to things like requirements, there is a market and a business case that drives the whole engineering process. If there was no business case, it's just a hobby and not a business. Why am I writing about this?

2011 through 2018 I was at a company with very developed processes, and rather static hierarchy, which all worked very well for that company. The company was well over 100 years old, so they had a long time to sort out a system that worked well for them. Then I joined the world of startups and young companies, because it's thrilling and an adventure. However, young companies don't have their processes and hierarchy all worked out. 2011 through 2018 I started in analysis (a sub-set of testing) and then moved over to design. When I started in the startup world I started in design, and then moved over to manufacturing. Through several different organizations I now see how the three basics of design, manufacturing, and testing are really the foundation of bringing a product to market. 

A really small company can have the design engineers build the product and test the product, however that doesn't scale very well beyond the first one, not even to 10 total units. So in the world of race cars, Mars landers, and other highly highly specialized, super low volume products it works, but by the time the volumes creep up to something like the Concord airplane or B2 Bomber (about 20 units total), there needs to be division of labor to keep up with any sort of production schedule and make sure that each role is adequately resourced. Some sort of program schedule takes shape and goes something like this:

Design, Manufacture, Test

Obviously that's an overly simplistic representation of a product development process. In today's world, a lot of testing can happen before the final product is manufactured through virtual analysis tools. And of course, the goal is for the prototypes and production to be the same... but of course that rarely happens and leads to a whole other topic of change control. Also left out of this discussion is requirements for the product. The better the requirements are defined in the beginning, the easier this whole process will be down the road. Defining requirements is hard, and frankly, there comes a point where it makes sense to just start designing and building the product prototypes in order to learn all of the formerly unknown requirements.

I once had the experience where the assembly design (and bill of materials) was released/confirmed on a Wednesday and the very next day the expectation was that we would build it... needless to say supply chain had not bought all of the parts to make that possible. I've also been asked in the past why it's hard to build something without a released bill of materials from design engineers, with the simple answer being, if you want manufacturing to buy all of the parts and use all of them in the product, then yes we need a bill of materials to go off of. I've had another example where some test engineers were adamant that the wrong assembly was built, and yet all three physically built prototypes, and the original virtual design, and the work instructions were all in agreement about the particular issue.

In all three examples, people were upset. They felt like they had been failed by their peers, but it was really a misunderstanding of what their peers needed as inputs in order to do their jobs well. Yet going back to 2011, when I was in analysis (testing), I remember saying that a 25 mm steel plate would work in a location, the design guy said nothing, but the manufacturing engineer said that was unreasonable and we needed to figure out how to use a smaller plate, so we did, because we now had a better requirement (no 25 mm thick plates on this assembly), and this all happened two years before prototypes were built. I remember that interaction as something of the gold standard for getting design, test, and manufacturing in the same room, two years before the assembly was first built, and four years before production, so that when we went to production that particular assembly was very smooth.

The general flow of engineering information.

And again, this image is a simplistic understanding of engineering. However, for the purpose of this article, this is really about organizational structure, schedules, inputs and outputs. It's not possible to do everything at once. Many things can be parallel pathed but you can't drive a car without wheels. You can't drill a hole without a tolerance. You can't weld two plates together if you don't know the materials. Hopefully this small overview gives non-engineers a little more context into the different areas of engineering, as well as perhaps new engineers information about different roles that I didn't understand until I had years of experience engineering. My advice to new college graduate engineers, get your hands dirty doing a little of all three. It doesn't really matter what you do the first two years of your career, just learn how things are designed, manufactured and tested. You can figure out which part you like best when you understand the engineering industry better.

Company Processes: The Drawing (Blueprint) Review

All companies have processes, how a company pays it's supply chain, and how it gets paid by it's customers are two big processes that need to go right. There are many different processes, but today I'm just going to talk about one, the drawing review.

As I was thinking about this post, I had the thought that there are probably two general types of companies. Those that have A similar number of inputs and outputs, like a farmer who buys five tons of seed, and half a year later has 500 tons of corn to sell, essentially one input and one output. Obviously modern farming is ridiculously more complicated than that, for example with satellites guiding tractors to make the most use of a field, and whole ecosystem of companies and products designed to make sure those seeds are planted on the perfect day at the perfect depth for their soil, with the perfect fertilizer. Similarly the services industry, while there may be a lot of specialized tools in any given service job, essentially the basic trade is one person's time for the other person's need. The other type of business, where I am far more familiar is where hundreds or thousands of individual parts are put together in order to be sold as a single working thing to a customer. In other words, a huge number of inputs and a small number of outputs, like the automotive industry, where thousands of parts go into a vehicle, and at the end you have three different trim levels, and seven colors, and four wheels to pick from, and that's it. 

A big part of making these complex things like cars, is designing one individual part, making a drawing also known as a blueprint, and having either an external or internal manufacturing group make the part. A drawing is one of the main deliverables from a design engineer. It is essentially, how to inspect the part so that it performs according to it's performance requirements. There is a push to put all of that information into the CAD (computer aided drawing) file, however it's a slow transition, so for the foreseeable future, drawings will continue to exist at most companies as the source of truth for what the physical part should be.

Drawings generally come in two flavors, in work (or draft) and released. There are different softwares to handle the approval process to go from an in work drawing to a released one. In most cases though, there is a human that did not design the part, that will review the drawing, often several humans. It is a way to catch errors, typos, and other things that could result in a nonfunctional part when it gets made. Often there are checklists for drawing reviews, other times it's left totally up to the discretion of the reviewer what he or she checks. Some people look at these as a chance to catch all the wrong things on a drawing, but as I've gotten older, I view them more as a language to communicate a desired function to the person manufacturing the part. Which is to say, most of my comments on drawing reviews these days are suggestions rather than requirements. 

The drawing review is often one of the last steps in the larger design review or design release process. The process that companies use to design an assembly of many different parts, and then release that to manufacturing for it to be made. It can be used as a stop gap, meaning, design reviews run the gamut from every dimension being discussed, to a few slides showing how the product generally works, yet the drawing review can often catch items that would make manufacturing the part impossible, items were not caught in a design review. 

There is no right or wrong for how to do a drawing review. It will be a different calculation for each company of what level of rigor or autonomy they want reviewing drawings. When I made my ultralight ice axe for Kickstarter, I actually made the conscious decision not to make a drawing, and accept any reasonable ice axe from the manufacturer. That is one extreme, since that part does not have to interact with any other parts. However, for assemblies of many parts, getting all of them to come together nicely can be very difficult, and it starts with good drawings. 

Will I write more about company processes? I don't know, but if I do, here is a list that I might write about.

• How to pay vendors.
• How to be paid by customers.
• How to make or do a thing (work instructions).
• How to document an imperfection or nonconformance.
• How to approve a purchase.
• The Design Review
• Meeting a requirement, and what is a requirement?
• How a company validates it's product before selling it.

Manufacturing from the Start

In April 2011, in my first couple weeks at work with the company I would spend seven and a half years with, I had a Webex meeting with myself (at the time the finite element structural analyst), the design engineer, and the manufacturing engineer for a particular welded assembly. I was presenting the results of my analysis, and then we would talk about next steps to try and optimize the structure to have a higher life, lower weight, and easier welding and assembly. The manufacturing engineer attended hundreds of meetings over the next four years before we actually started production of that particular item and many other similar items in January 2015. You should have heard the arguments over how big the internal access holes had to be!

I had forgotten about this experience until recently, and it struck me how talking about manufacturing so early in the design phase helped avoid future problems. I think for anyone reading this they will say "of course", but I wasn't actually able to articulate that until just recently. I remember one day back in 2011 recommending 25 mm thick steel plates for a component, and the manufacturing engineer essentially said no, 20 mm was the max thickness unless there was a really really good reason. In this case we found a way to use thinner plates.

In April and May of 2013 we built 24 prototype machines for this program, and we found major issues left and right! There were a lot of young engineers on the program and we simply didn't know any better. Looking back it had to be one of the best learning experiences for a 25-29 year old new engineer to be able to make mistakes and then have time to correct them.

However, also looking back we did a lot of things really right. Having a manufacturing representative involved in the structural analysis discussions two years before building prototypes and four years before the start of production laid a lot of good groundwork for designs that were structurally sound and not excessively difficult to manufacturer. For example, we did a lot of welding plates together, and had welding robots, so we optimized the design of joints for the welding robots. I was thinking about this because I was recently part of an issue that in hind sight we should have thought about before we encountered it. And frankly, it's a wildly different scenario holistically from the 2011 through 2015 manufacturing story, so it's not an apples to apples comparison. Still the recent issue was embarrassing and humiliating to me personally because I realized that it was totally possible to get ahead of the issue, if we had simply thought about it two years ago.

This is part of a larger arc that I'm articulating my way through. How do you go from nothing into something? How do you see a market need, and then put out a physical product in volume to meet that need? At some point in the future I'll go into depth on systems engineering, because that's pretty underrated. For today the lesson is include manufacturing early, even when you might not think to, like on structural analysis result discussions well before the first parts get made. I think it's probably faster to iterate with more people in the room than it would be to iterate on one aspect of a design at a time (strength of the part, manufacturing of the part, etc.) in series.

The Conversion of a Reluctant Manufacturing Engineer

Back in 2010 I was interviewed several times and I would get asked what I wanted to do. Frankly at the time I didn't really understand that design, manufacturing, and testing were the three main areas of engineering. I didn't understand that engineers don't do all of those things. Then in the winter of 2014-2015 I was a design engineer and part of a big product launch when a weld manufacturing engineer I worked closely with asked if I would joint manufacturing. I laughed. I laughed because I saw how hard that job was, but I still didn't make the connection that manufacturing was such a key aspect of a business and the manufacturing engineers were no different than me. I think my ego of a masters degree and design experience seemed to make me uniquely qualified for my role, while I imagined that the manufacturing engineers had some special training or aptitude for their roles, while in general they didn't.

Somewhere I saw a quote attributed to the founder of Toyota that a good engineer gets his hands dirty on the floor and has to wash his hands at least three times a day. I can't find the quote after a short search so it's very possible it's misattributed or never happened. However, it's stuck with me for over a decade. I have always felt that an engineer needs to be out there on the floor or in the field touching the parts. That's how you understand the actual parts and not just the virtual models of those parts on the computer screen. Still, I never saw myself in manufacturing, despite the months of work days that I spent on the manufacturing floor starting in graduate school in 2008.

In 2020 for various reasons, a major one being how difficult the job is, both of the manufacturing engineers involved in daily manufacturing at my company left, and I moved over to manufacturing. I've been here just over a year and a half now, and I have learned a lot. For example, Elon Musk gave an interview last year to Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd and about halfway through the video he goes on a tangent about how design is overrated and manufacturing is underrated. Based on my 12 years in industry, yes, design is typically perceived to be mentally challenging and manufacturing is not, even though it really is quite the mental challenge and a challenge for many companies. 

In January and February I polled 20 of my coworkers who are not in manufacturing and asked "What would it take to get you to join manufacturing?" Most laughed at me. All 20 initially said no, with one saying maybe when I poked and prodded on her career plans. For six of them I then asked a follow on question "What if we doubled your salary?" and still only three said yes. It's mind-blowing to me that people would not take this job for double their salary. Everyone I asked makes at least $80,000 per year. When I moved over to manufacturing there was no pay raise, I did it because it needed to be done. 

Seeing the war in Ukraine, and not to mention all the supply chain issues we have seen in the last two years both as a consumer and in business, I've been thinking about how important manufacturing is. Specifically, while the war in Ukraine is on the smaller side, if you go back to world war two American factories were pumping out tanks, planes, ships, and all manner of other equipment working seven days a week and 24 hours a day. The size of that effort now overwhelms me just thinking about it. My personal demand for manufactured things is small, I don't buy that much stuff, yet as I approach a car purchase in the years to come, I can't help but think cars are a wonder of manufacturing.

In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs he recounts on page 546 in the hardcover how Steve told President Obama that moving iPhone manufacturing to the USA would take 700,000 people, which they could get, but 30,000 manufacturing engineers, which they couldn't get unless there was a way to get them all trained. As the war in Ukraine goes on and people fear a new cold war, I realized again how important manufacturing is. We can do without manufacturing for months, years even, by repairing the current things we already have, but if we want new things that are more highly engineered and more capable than our old things, we need to manufacture. 

Where am I going with this? Until just recently I still saw myself as a design engineer, that is where most of my career has been and I'm good at it. For years when asked to put a job title on a form I've just put engineer, and I'll keep doing that even as my title changes. I think I've had some shame at being a manufacturing engineer, it doesn't seem as illustrious as a design engineer, but the longer I live in the manufacturing world the more I realize how interconnected design, test, and manufacturing are, and how manufacturing is in many ways the most important part. For example NASA has designed dozens of space vehicles that were never built or tested, but SpaceX has already built and is about to test a rocket which, if successful, is a total game changer. 

So I encourage other engineers, especially ones with less than 10 years experience, to do a stint in manufacturing and see what the challenges are in person. It will be infuriating at times when changes so small you can't even see the difference with your eyes take days to solve. But that is the whole point, to solve the mundane issues so that it's easier to build the thing in the future. 

Perfectly Overwhelmed

It's been a long time with no blog posts. In part that's because of my newish role at work. I interact with a lot of people and so any talk I have about others at work would be immediately obvious who I was talking about, and I don't want to write anything about my friends without their consent. It's also due to my running being so mediocre compared to where it was prior to 2018 and the pulmonary embolism and broken ankle. Next, I haven't felt exactly like I'm "learning to do" a lot in 2020, it was kind of a rough year, with a lot of triage just doing, and not taking the time to learn. I took time to reflect, but not necessarily learn. Then of course taking care of my own mental health. On the upside I have a girlfriend, and that's going really really well. For example, we spent six hours together the other day and spent about five of those hours talking with each other, it's pretty great.

Let me get to the point, in my department we've had five new people start in the last six months including two in essentially the same role I have. All sorts of great questions have come up, such as, "What should I be working on?" We've come up with a prioritization system of the daily highest priorities to address that. The next issue is dealing with the volume of work that is headed at our little group. It's actually been comforting to me as my new coworkers become "overwhelmed" because that's exactly how I felt at the end of the summer as we were trying to ship a lot of product and people I was relying on were leaving the company for more money and a more suitable culture to their personalities. Plus, back then there was no one to ask for help. The defining moment was a Saturday when I and another coworker who has been at our company for two years showed up for half an hour when FedEx arrived to pick up a Custom Critical shipment to a customer (who still have not used the product yet months later). It was simply exhausting, and it just felt very isolating because instead of having a team to help I felt like, 'who's going to do this, because person X and Y left? ... I guess I'm going to do this.'

The situation was clearly an issue, so we reorganized and hired those five people I'm talking about. We've started to hit a stride in the last couple weeks. We're kind of at the peak wave for paper work in 2020 in my department. In other words, in a few weeks the changes will have settled down so the paperwork is taken care of and it's really hardware problems we're dealing with, which is of course more fun. There will likely be another paperwork surge late in 2021, but depending on how the next few months of design go, it may be 2022. 

The point being, the new employees seem to be perfectly overwhelmed. It's crept up to too overwhelmed at times, and when that happens I try to step in and ease the burden, but I'll admit I can only do so much, and frankly most of them have skills I don't have. At many of the old established companies things move so slow people are not engaged, they are not overwhelmed at all. Often the expected daily work can be done in half a day by an experienced employee. At some of the other startups in my industry people are too overwhelmed and just burn out after several years. There is this happy medium where the work is exciting, there is a lot of it, and when you leave at the end of the day you feel like you did enough and aren't letting the company down because you want to go on a run and take care of your mental health and family. I think we're pretty close to perfect in that realm. Personally I think we are closer to the burnout side than the not engaged side, but close enough that I'm not a black sheep when I leave at 4 PM for the day. 

I've been excited the whole time I've been at my current company, all two years and five months of it, but recently I've gotten to be the most excited I've ever been about it. It's like the feeling when you leave the South Col at 8:30 pm for the summit of Mt. Everest. I had been waiting 12 years for that night, and when it happens, and the weather is objectively great you know it's going to be a good day just doing what you've been preparing to do for years. That's how I feel now at work. We're not at the summit but we know what it takes, and the path is incredibly clear the next year and a half. 

Changing Orders of Magnitude

As my little startup grows I’ve had some time to think about what sort of scaling I like. I think about orders of magnitude as a good indicator of the challenges. I'm not talking about number of employees, as I have bounced this concept off of some of my coworkers that's what they all assume, but rather number of products made. So to get into it:

First is zero to one. That in many respects is the hardest order of magnitude because you go from nothing to something. Advantages: you don’t have to worry about tolerances, because as long as it fits it works, if not pull out the die grinder.  Disadvantages: performance might be all over the map, it will probably take a long time to make it, it might fail quick, like within 120 feet like the Wright brothers first airplane crashed after four flights. 

At this stage even things I consider engineering and science are really in large part an art project. At my old company we called these builds "mules" because they were cobbled together to test a very specific set of variables. Typically only one was built, although sometimes two were. While we then qualified and warrantied our eventual products to 8,000 hours, a mule might only see 100-200 hours of operation to confirm that some big technical issue worked. 

A fun story, which was stressful at the time, back in the fall of 2012 I believe I was part of a big project, a $150 million dollar program, as a very junior engineer. Prior to my joining two mules had been made to test a new transmission, one for vehicle type A and one for vehicle type B. Vehicle type A was a success, the transmission worked well, but vehicle type B the same transmission just did not have the shift timing required, so about six months before we were planned to build 24 prototype machines, we made a program change to a different transmission. It was a big change that required a lot of design updates, analysis, and tooling changes. It was the right decision and shows the value of "failing" when you make a sample of one.

The next step is from one to ten. Suddenly tolerances start to matter, but you can still pull out a die grinder and make it fit if needed. There are small economies of scale, amazingly the difference between ordering one part and two parts is about 25%. In other words, to buy just one might cost $100, but to buy two might cost $150, and three might be $190. 

The same program I mentioned earlier, in November of 2013 when we had the 24 prototype machines I think six were in the field collecting hours. Suddenly we had a failure that we had not seen before. Turns out I had failed to account for a side load in my FEA the year before. So in the space of two days I confirmed the FEA with the new load case, we made some steel plates, and on the third day flew to Canada to oversee the weld repairs to fix the machine. We ended up having to rework basically all the machines with that particular feature, about 12 in all. 

At this point you can joke about being in production, although even if you try to keep things the same there will be inevitable differences, which might amount to several percent of performance. 

From 10 to 100. This is my favorite order of magnitude to transition across. Tolerances really matter at this point. If you screw it up and have to rework 100 parts, suddenly that’s a big deal. You get sizable discounts on machined parts. Castings and forgings are possible and may be financially justified at this scale depending on the application. At this stage problems are more expensive. 

I like this transition because in addition to the problems typically being more complex (like tolerance stack-ups with 15 parts) there is a level of consistency and volume that gives it a feeling of a real business. A big upside is that certain things become routine, as in every product achieves a basic level of performance. 

As an example, in the winter of 2014-2015 that $150 million program went to production. I was responsible for a very large welded structure. I reviewed the dimension inspection reports for each of the first 20 structures, and we were seeing 100+ points out of tolerance, I went through and listed things that were unacceptable and things that were acceptable, in a four page email. One of the dimensions was the overall length of the structure. It was up to 12 mm too short. I didn't know if that was bad or good. Turns out the other parts that mounted to this structure did not have the tolerance stack up correct fit. We ended up grinding hundreds of holes larger to make the parts fit, until we realized that adjusting the welding fixture on the large structure would solve the problem. 

100 to 1000. At this point you are probably outsourcing some operations to companies that will be doing them full time. Companies that make one of your components will make that during all working hours because the volumes are that high. At this point mistakes become quite expensive. My most expensive mistake was failing to correct an interference between two parts that ended up having over $500,000 in warranty claims in 2015 and 2016 before the design and tooling was updated in late 2015. 

At this stage, things start to happen fast. Mistakes are propagated uncomfortably fast. Making a change, after 100+ have been made an old way is hard and expensive. There is still an air of improvisation, most product lines will have individual product deviations from perfect and dimensions that are out of tolerance (unless the designers are amazing). Production is low enough that if you have to stop the assembly line for a day or a week or even a month, it's not the end of the world. Most likely profit margins are still high enough to tolerate that kind of pause. 

1000 to 10,000. This is where automation starts to become a bigger factor. To get programs set up and running without constant stoppages takes a longer ramp up. At lower levels of manufacturing humans can basically assemble it all, but at this point there will likely be fixtures and keep out cages to keep people away from interfering with the robot operation. 

At this point there will be many continuous improvement changes that at a lower level of production might have been recalls or reworks for all of the parts built. This is why most engineers with some experience don't like to buy the first model year of a new vehicle. There are dozens of changes that need to get ironed out that you don't even know about until you get to a higher volume. Unfortunately sheetmetal and plastic parts are often one of the issues. A skilled assembler will be able to make the part fit by loosening and tightening various mating parts, but then a new person will try it and nothing will fit. Inevitably the design will need to be changed to make it more robust. Similarly, long term drivetrain issues often start to appear at this magnitude. Gears and bearings are often robust enough to last thousands of hours, but minuscule misalignment will often destroy them. In other words, this is the reliability of vehicles in the 1960s, 1970s. 

10,000 to 100,000. This is the limit of my experience. I’ve never worked on a part with over 60,000 used per year. Stamping is huge at this point, because it’s super fast and repeatable. Mistakes are different at this stage. Programs are typically large enough with enough testing that the really low hours, gross errors, don't happen any more. Improvements are typically based on warranty claims at this point. It may be millions of dollars in warranty claims over years, but it can take awhile for those to show up. They are often due to specific conditions. The largest warranty issue I worked on had something like $2 million in warranty claims over seven years and it took us more than half a year to figure out how to replicate it in the lab. It was quite debatable on how to go about fixing it. 

At this level statistics becomes far more important. At lower levels of production when there is an issue, you just go fix it. You might have to parallel path multiple different fixes if you aren't totally sure what will do it, but at this level there are random failures that statistically are not worth the time and effort to go and fix. For example, I have only ever heard of one belay loop breaking on a harness ever. He was a famous climber, so it's a somewhat well known event. As a result the climbing companies did some testing and determined it was so rare no big changes were needed. In the automotive world, this is basically the range of statistical confidence that manufacturers get into when they are doing their prototype testing. It becomes much more expensive to fix these "little" issues or even find them when testing 100 prototype cars. 

From 100,000 to 1 million is beyond anything I have worked on. However, I am familiar with a couple stories, when bolts have a bad steel lot for example, or the base steel material is defect, it can be nearly impossible to determine when the problem began. When you see huge automotive recalls this is because they are getting into corner cases of corner cases. The Takata airbag saga is still another level or two beyond this level, but it is illustrative of the issues at this level. Somewhere around 20+ people died and 250+ injured worldwide and there are 45 million affected vehicles that had those airbags. Finding that kind of error in a typical testing program is not guaranteed. I'm sure after one or two people died the engineers and managers scratched their head and wondered, is it a bad design or a random occurrence? Kind of like Teslas having crashes while on autopilot. It's hard to say from such a small sample size with much confidence what the real issue is. People slip and fall and die in the shower all the time, but we don't quit taking showers. 

In short, while I really like statistics, these huge orders of magnitude do not really interest me because the problems can be so complex with so many variables that a solution can easily be worse the the original problem, even with additional testing. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try for improvement, rather that the reality is we will never achieve it. In other words, there will always be engineering jobs, even if something happened to reset the world back to zero and we had to start over again. 

Colorado Startup Life: Weeks 0 and 1

I'm sitting outside at a Starbucks... that doesn't close until 10 PM... a 15 minute walk from my apartment... in Longmont, Colorado. It's emotional. I mean, I feel like I have arrived. I feel like, the me that I envisioned back in college has happened. To my back the sunlight fades over Longs Peak and the rest of the mountains. To my front is a Pho something restaurant.

September 14th I moved into my apartment in Longmont. September 15th my friend J and I climbed Long Peak. Unfortunately my lung issue is alive and well and it took me 11 hours car to car. That's pretty slow for me. Back in 2006, just walking, I did it in 8.5 hours. Sunday the 15th I took him to the airport and laid on the couch the rest of the day.

I'm convinced it's a lung issue, and most likely pleurisy due to some sort of infection around the lungs. That being said, for the rest of September I'm on my old insurance with my former employer, so I'm waiting until October for my new insurance to kick in to restart the doctors visits. If I start blogging more, I'll write a whole lot about this breathing issue. In short, the oxygen isn't getting to my muscles. I've had two blood tests, a tick panel, lead check, electrolyte check, two chest x-rays, mononucleosis check, EKG, stress test, and an echocardiogram. Everything came back normal or negative. The biggest surprise was that I have had mono! I turned myself into a germaphobe back in high school when a bunch of my friends came down with mono in a few months. Well, I must have had it back when I was a baby or something, because in my memory I never had it.

Monday the 17th was my first day at my new job. I had a lot of fear. Would I be able to contribute? Would the work be too different than what I have done the last eight years? They're going to discover I'm an incompetent imposter!

HAHAHAHA!!!! Day one was fairly uneventful, but by day two I was being rather productive. One of my first tasks was to knock out about a dozen drawings. I was knocking them out quickly, and on Wednesday or Thursday, I did five from scratch in one day! Plus, I sit between two people who are directly out of university this spring, and I end up getting to answer questions about CREO already! In short, the fear I had about not creating value has gone. Instead, I have the realization that people aren't just going to give me work tasks, I'm going to have to create them myself. Which isn't bad at all, I've already started mapping our current processes.

My title is Product Configuration Engineer. Technically, it's Senior Product Configuration Engineer, but I'm not sure how I feel about the senior part. I'm happy that my experience is recognized with the title, but I'm a fan of the more egalitarian title because I know I stand to learn things from my coworkers who are only four months out of university as well. What exactly is a configuration engineer you ask? Well, I was hoping you could tell me, haha. I think I'm the 27th employee at this three year old aerospace company and I know their only configuration engineer.

I know configuration engineer means a few things. I will eventually own the top level product assemblies. I'm on the design side, not the test or manufacturing side, although I need to work with them quite a bit. It falls to me to define, or at least take a leading role in defining the systems and processes needed to scale the company from what they have now (which is very basic) to something that conveys all the right information to all of the right people within the company about our products  (our parts). It's a difficult problem. Put too much process in place and it's onerous and as one of my experienced coworkers said today about having to use a specific software "I'd quit". On the other hand, don't have enough process, and mistakes will get made. In fact, a few mistakes have already been made to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in wasted parts. In short, I feel I am perfect for this job! It's an opportunity, to define the company process and structure for part workflow, that I would not have for another ten years at a large corporation. Informally I've thought about structure and organization for years. Now, I get to do something about it.

After work every day I was pretty tired so I didn't do any running or bicycling. I basically went home, called my parents or my sister and ate dinner and went to bed.

Saturday my friend L and I went and hiked Mt. Princeton. She out hiked me, and she's a nurse who has known me for 10 years, so knew that was not normal. At the top of the mountain my pulse oxygen percentage was 65%. When I told L, she said, "And you're conscious!?!?!" My lowest on Everest in 2016 was 59%, and I say that when it gets below 70% that's not so good. Fortunately by the time we were back in the car on the way down it was up to 88%. Some of that I attribute to not being acclimated yet, but most is due to my breathing problem.

My week starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday. Not sure how long this series will last. Over the last 2.5 years I've basically gotten out of blogging, but I miss it.  If anyone is new to my blog, I don't post names unless I ask the person ahead of time, usually just an initial. I try to respect everyone's privacy,  both individuals, and my employer. Generally speaking, if I feel that telling a story will violate someone's privacy, I won't tell it unless I feel some sort of moral obligation to warn others.

Goals for the next few weeks: Get my breathing issue figured out. Exceed expectations at work. Pay all of my bills on time. Work through sending my thank you notes to my previous coworkers.

The Best Factory I have Ever Seen

That’s not to be taken as an insignificant statement. I’ve spent a lot of time in factories. It’s my job, and my family used to tour factories on vacations. I’ve never tried to count the number of factories I have spent time in, it’s probably under 100, but above 50. Now, to be fair to my evaluation of factories I have never been in an automotive final assembly plant, or a semiconductor factory. I have seen clean rooms where semiconductors can be manufactured, but not the main production factory. 

This factory, the best I have ever seen, why was it so good? I’ll give a few examples. For starters they use a pick-to-light system where the assembler grabs the part from a bin that has a green light on it. The light will go red if he or she tries to pick from the wrong bin. It can be both motion activated or a push button on the light. After picking a part, the computer system will then move onto the next part that needs to be picked. It’s great, I’ve never seen that in another factory. 

Next, there is one particular station on one of their assembly lines where two steel pieces are assembled with a rubber seal in between, and if the rubber seal rolls or is cut, there is no way to tell visually. It may even pass the end of line pressure test. So they use a device to measure the force as the two steel parts come together, and if there is an anomaly they can disassemble the parts and inspect the rubber seal. It’s pretty sophisticated. 

The factory is clean too. Factories have been getting cleaner and cleaner the last decade, but this one just took the cake. I didn’t see any oil or dust around the hard to clean places. On the six inch by twelve inch bins used to store the small assembly parts they used lids over many of the parts to avoid any dust getting on the parts. Plus, it was the best lit factory I can remember, and the air quality inside was fantastic. Now, in the defense of many other factories, there is no welding or heat treating in this factory, so it is easier to keep the air clean. Along those lines, they use DC drivers exclusively for final torques on bolts. That’s not unique, many factories in Germany do the same, forgoing air drivers which are less precise, and create a noisy work environment. Watch videos of the Porsche factory in Germany to get an idea of what I am talking about. 

Finally, near and dear to my heart, they use shims on many of their products. Shims are used to take up a gap between two parts so that they don’t slide back and forth destroying the whole assembly. It is important to have the correct total thickness of shims in a joint. This factory measures the gaps before using any shims so that the number and thickness of shims will be correct. Often factories just guess, or use a standard number of shims. 

Where was this amazing factory? Torreon, Mexico. I must be honest, I have some nationalistic bias to the United States. I feel (or felt) our manufacturing is better than Mexico’s, probably because of all the negative propaganda against Mexico in the United States, yet I have no evidence. After following the UAW negotiations last fall with the big three automakers, assembly for several vehicles getting outsourced to Mexico was a big factor in the discussions. That’s work that the USA is losing to Mexico. I thought moving those factories to Mexico was entirely about the cost of labor. After seeing this factory… I am surprised we don’t move more manufacturing from the USA to Mexico. Certainly this one factory is not representative of the entire country, one new contract employee at the factory told us it was the best factory in Torreon, a big city, and she was very excited to work there. Point being, it reminds me of the question I often ask, “what is possible?” Sure, anything is possible, but seeing what is possible in an industrial setting, in Mexico, not Germany or the United States or South Korea is taking me some time to comprehend. 

So Good He Scares Me

It's comfortable to sit back. Not necessarily easy, as it requires a certain compromise, but given only two options of doing something intimidating versus not doing something intimidating, the not doing is easier. This blog post by Seth Godin pointed that out to me really well. It struck me in two different ways, both the impersonal task, and the personal.

On the impersonal side, I just climbed Mt. Everest, and moved to rural Kansas. Talk about back to back "scary" things. Both things offer intimidation, risks, and the chance that I would "fail". How one defines failure varies. As a note, fear, and scared are not the same things, being scared might be defined as letting fear drive the decision to avoid a risk, where as fear might be described as the acknowledgement of risk. In other words, on Mt. Everest there were many things I was afraid of, but I never felt scared.

Today though I want to talk about the personal side. When a person is intimidating, and I'm not even talking dating, which is a whole other topic. In 2009 I met Gerlinde Kaltenbruner in Pakistan, I was starstruck, same when I initially met Melissa Arnot in 2014. Two people with reputations that far preceded them. It is the same in the engineering world. Some people have so much experience and knowledge, I (and admit it, we) feel stupid asking every question that comes to mind, which is ridiculous. Although, I will say that how a person responds to questions does impact our willingness to ask more questions. If a person is made to feel the question is stupid, he or she is less likely to ask questions in the future. That is a big part of the reason I am down here in Kansas. My new immediate coworkers know stuff I don't understand. Plus, they seem very willing to teach. I could have continued to fumble my way through understanding all of this, in other words, sit back, or I could dive into a situation that scares me. I took the plunge and it's only beginning.

Scared of Turning 30: Part 3

Should I leave Dubuque?

Every few months one of my friends leave, and about once a year it is one of my closer friends. The conversation recently among a few of my friends has been that it may be time to leave. We've been here some time, and while life is good, that's why we are still here, there is more to the world. In fact we all all agree that us being here is a big part of why each one of us have stayed this long.

When I came here in the spring of 2011, I thought that my life would go one way, car, house, wife, stability, etc. I didn't voice it, or even articulate that in my head, and had you asked me I would have said that Everest was a higher priority in the short term than those things, but the way I acted that first year in town was certainly one of looking to settle down. Then those relationships didn't really work out, and I grew caught up in coaching, running, mountain climbing, work and now here I am nearly five years later, living in the same apartment, with nearly the same hobbies, making some more money but not tremendously more, and I've never had an actual promotion. What happened to the time?

It's not that Dubuque is bad, on the contrary, it's pretty awesome. For a runner like myself the Mines of Spain and Heritage trail are great facilities! Part of my wanderlust is that I have been here almost five years, and the longest I have ever lived some place is six years. What is home? I will never spend another night in any of the houses I grew up in. Sometimes I feel like life is a one way street, you get to live it once, no u-turns. Perhaps life is more like a jet plane, no reverse, but you can cover a lot of ground going forward. People put a lot of value into sunk costs, those things they have already put time and effort into, while undervaluing the opportunity cost of not taking new opportunities. Making the decision, by not making a decision to pursue new options, sinks more cost into the current situation, and gives up what opportunity may exist in the new endeavor. It's why I keep climbing mountains, what might happen is well worth the time, money and effort I put into it.

At the moment I am being recruited by a different division in my company for a promotion to move to another state. It is an honor to be recognized as a strong candidate for this position. I've been recruited for promotions in the past, but unfortunately they were not in areas that excited me much. While I am on the topic of career, I have realized that responsibility, and authority, do not directly correlate with pay grade. In general they do, but a grade to two grades often means little in terms of actual authority.

I heard once that if you stay five years you are more likely to stay for a very long time. Strangely I feel like I am making that a reality. Am I committing to Dubuque indefinitely? It feels like if there is a time to move, it might as well be now. I don't know.

I don't know. Those sunk costs are really emotional! And opportunity costs are so intangible, we don't know the future.

The Value of Face to Face

Why am I flying to Germany for the second strait month? Why am I interrupting my running schedule, my routine, losing all this sleep, to talk to a bunch of people I email every three days?

Well, it is far more effective. Seriously, I could fly here, go to half a day of meetings, and fly home, and it would be a better value of my engineering time than two and a half days of work.

Sure, there is significant value to emails, phone calls, text messages and the like, but seeing the person face to face, we can take as long as we want to discuss face to face. We can go into the details of the issue, draw pictures, take a 10 minute break, drink more coffee, and figure out a solution better, by seeing the person sit across the table from us than we can over the phone. There is definitely value to phone calls and emails and text messages, but sometimes nothing substitutes for the real person. The message is the same, but how you say it in person seems to vary less than how you say it over writing or the phone.

I Bought a Car on eBay: Replacing 1st Gen Honda Insight Battery

There is a reason I bought a 2002 Honda Insight with 144,000 miles in good condition for only $2,400, I knew I was going to have to replace the hybrid battery. Replacing the battery is a $2,000 to $3000 adventure. When the IMA light came on initially, I didn't think it was a huge deal, and I continued to drive for a few weeks normally. Then came a day when the battery drained to zero, and didn't immediately recharge. At that point it was like the computer was commanding electric assist, and thinking it was happening, but there was no electric assist. I basically had to floor the accelerator pedal at every stop sign and red light to start moving again. Needless to say, this wasn't going to work forever.

I took my 2002 Honda Insight into the local Honda dealership in mid September to have an oil change, my first while I have owned it, although I did only put about 5000 miles on it in the last year, and also to have them look at the IMA battery light. They confirmed that the battery was bad and needed to be replaced and told me it was in the neighborhood of $3000 for parts and labor. I knew that going in, actually, I was surprised that their estimate wasn't higher. In fact, getting a little mechanical and electrical experience by personally replacing the hybrid battery was part of the reason I bought this old car. I told the service manager that I would like to do the replacement myself and he seemed surprised, I think it was the first independent hybrid battery replacement he had heard of. All told I made it out of the dealership with a bill for $155 for the oil change and labor time inspecting the battery and controller, which they confirmed was working correctly. Which is a reason I typically don't go to bar dealerships for service, it's expensive. It is worth mentioning, in ten months of ownership this is the first service bill I had on my Honda. Other than this I have only paid for gas, and a $30 or so kit to clean the headlights which were clouded from 12 year old plastic.

The next step was to purchase a battery. I bought mine from Bumblebee Batteries out of Portland, OR in early October. They advertised more battery capacity (8 amp hours versus 6.5), a 20 minute video above on how to remove and install the battery, and they had positive reviews. The cost came to $2,770, which is more than I paid for the entire vehicle, that that also included $500 which would be refunded when I return the old hybrid battery core, or rather enticement module. I sent the module back before Thanksgiving. There was a delay because I wanted to tear down the actually battery before I sent it back. I also had to buy some tools, about $40 worth of sockets and wrenches.

An 80 pound package beside a car!

To be honest, following Bumblebee's video, the extrication went really smoothly. The worst part was the big 12 mm socket bolts behind the passenger seat. I just could not quire reach it and get more than 15 degrees of wrench movement with my three inch socket extension, and had to go back to the store and get a 6 inch socket extension, which I then used a cheater bar on to get a little more leverage.

Under the Carpet

I don't like getting dirty. The concept of digging into a bunch of oil and grease for fun isn't that fun for me. However, I really like turning wrenches and seeing how things work, and doing physical work. In other words, electrical and structural work, which is relatively clean, like the work to replace the hybrid battery, was great fun for me. Sure I can have a good time working on an engine or hydraulics system, and I like the physical experience of working on things that I sit behind a computer all day starting at, but I am just not a fan of getting covered in oil.

Under the Cover

The battery went in very smoothly. I think it took me around three hours of work in the back of my car, plus another hour going to the store to buy tools. The battery took maybe 1:45 to get out, and the new one went back in the car in just over an hour. Like any other project, the first time you do it is the hardest because you have no idea what you are doing.

Disconnecting the Battery Control Units

Two hybrid batteries beside a car.

Before I sent the old battery back I wanted to tear it down too. I heard that it was made with basically D cell batteries, planning that future third party after market companies could service the battery pack. I wanted to take it apart because if I could in deed just replace the batteries the next time the battery goes out in 2022, that would probably cost a whole lot less, maybe several hundred dollars. Typically, the more work you can do yourself, the more money you will save. Well I took it apart in this order:

Disassembling a Honda Insight 1st Gen Hybrid Battery

The Battery Pack

Removed white plastic cover and several bolts.

Remove Three Bolts

Removing More Bolts

Remove the Bolts Behind these Rubber Plugs

Don't loose these spacers!

Remove these six screws, I think...

Remove the bolts and screws on both orange plates, the screws are very small.

Pull out a battery. I bolted small plate to it and pulled it out with a wire.

One six cell "Battery"

When I finally pulled out the actually batteries they had a plastic shrink wrap over them, and the only way I was getting in there was with a knife, and frankly, I wasn't ready to do that. My concern was that the shrinkwrap probably keeps the six batteries together and I might have trouble keeping them together if I go at it with a knife. Six 1.5 volt cells in each "battery" and 20 "batteries" in each module connected in series is 180 volts, most much higher than the 144 volts rating of the battery pack. In other words, if two cells within a "battery" are not touching, the whole thing might not work. Of course, once bolted into the battery frame there is pressure on the batteries so it probably would not be an issue, especially I returned this to a guy that is probably going to tear them apart and replace them anyway.

The end connection has a threaded hole and thin electrical tab.

Looking Inside the "Battery" tube, notice the four rubber flaps to help stabilize the "battery".

Be careful aligning the electrical tab on each "battery" with the slots in the orange plates, it took me several tries, because I had to straiten them all before putting the orange plates back on, then bend them all to screw them back into the orange plates.

The 20 "batteries" shown with their electrical tabs bent down, and the hardware I took off to get that far. All the battery pack required for this much disassembly was a 10 mm hex socket and a phillips screw driver.

When you put it back together, watch out for the four bolts that go from the control panel into the batteries, the ones hidden behind the rubber plugs, I shocked myself by holding the lower left bolt and then the bolt closest to the middle. It was definitely more than a standard 9V battery shock, but way less than sticking a knife in a 110V 15 Amp outlet. Honestly the dead battery pack might only have like 3-4 amps at this point at 144 volts, assuming that I got the full brunt of the battery pack, not some subset. Remember, it's the amps that kill not the volts.

Showing the recessed bolts that might shock you.

The process to replace the battery itself was very strait forward, it followed the Bumblebee video exactly, there were no design changes that were different between the video and my car. Would I do it again? Well, my parents recently bought a 2014 Prius C and I would be interested down the line to try and replace that hybrid battery. In other words, yes I would do it again.

Another Reason the Like Helicopters...

It's a video, from 1980 I think: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nm8iV_uiBsI

Helicopters man... 

Discerning Meaning From a Sample Size of One

Way back when I was in college. Nate Jenkins made a comment on his blog about how each athlete, marathon runner specifically, is a study of one, someone who will respond slightly differently to the training as anyone else. As a master of science (and I do have my M.S.) it has always stuck out to me because the scientific part of me thinks, 'what can you possibly learn based on one example?' Yet another part of me knows that to say you can't learn anything from a sample of one does not make sense because that is how we have learned everything. At one point Thomas Edison, or probably one of his assistants, turned the light bulb on and it didn't burn out in a few seconds, or even a few minutes, it kept glowing for 13.5 hours. It was only a sample of one, but it was a breakthrough. 

While I could talk about Patrick Makau, Wilson Kipsang, or Dennis Kimetto, the last three marathon world record holders, who don't have any Olympic medals between the three of them because they are all relatively up and coming, and I could say how each one is a study of one with little to teach sedentary Americans about running, those three are a huge study in team work, training, and Kenya having an environment for the marathon. However, Kenya is about to get a number of athletes exposed for doping over the next couple months, so I won't talk about running tonight. I just wanted to say that as a middle class American I highly doubt I can replicate the conditions for anyone in the U.S.A. to have the same background as each of them. However, they all run lots of miles, and run hard workouts, which is a good place to start training to be your best. No, I'm not going to write about running today, but rather engineering. 

I have had four days of testing in the cold room at -40 degrees C/F this year. Two in May and two just recently in November. While preparing for these tests one of the comments was how, "each test is different, you can't conclude X, Y and Z from one test." Now that I have been through four of these I see what he meant. Do you know what oil does at -40 degrees? Probably not, because no one really does, if we knew how to analytically model it, instead of testing in the cold room, we would. Every test has presented some surprise. I won't divulge the specifics, but like the title of the article how can you say X works or does not work from a one hour long real time test? It can work for ten minutes, then quit working. Another example of small sample sizes I really like, the space program, specifically Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Every mission was trying something that had never been done before, and if they got it to work, once, it was a huge success. In hindsight we only hear about the successes, and maybe Apollo 1, but space walking was a huge challenge on Gemini until Buzz Aldrin trained in a swimming pool. Apollo 11 had a computer malfunction giving an error as it became overloaded. Apollo 14 almost didn't land on the moon because of a short circuit in the lander that could have triggered an automatic abort. I'm getting off topic, but the point is to show that just because we landed successfully on the moon once doesn't mean that future landing were risk free at all. 

Of my four tests, they always happen in pairs, a baseline and a prototype test, so I have really only tested two new designs. In May we failed, the results were inconclusive due to a number of factors so we went back to the drawing board and asked the experts and came up with a new design. The new design "passed" but there were a couple of issues we encountered during testing and while the results still seemed to show the new design was better than the old design, there is no one waving a flag and cheering saying "This is the answer! You solved the problem!" Partly because people don't do that often in engineering, but also because we all know that minor variations in one test could affect the future production reliability. 

If I was more versed in statistics I would enjoy talking about Weibull slopes and probabilities, but I am not an expert there. There is always the chance that this test was of the best possible situation and you won't pass again. Typically situations in real life are more similar than they are different, which is very fortunate, but we engineers still spend much of our time working on the rare cases and trying to discern the two factors that contributed to failure in that particular instance. 

What can you conclude from a sample of one? It worked that time, it may work again, under the same conditions. That's a positive spin on it, but an accurate view too.

When There is a Risk, Send the Engineer.

Sometimes I wonder why I have been traveling so much recently. Most of the time I'm only marginally helpful. Certainly I have gotten better at operating heavy equipment and my mechanic skills are growing. However, you don't need to fly an engineer down and pay his travel expenses to do that. Well, yesterday we broke a little plastic piece, and it's not a service part, so how do you fix it? Well, you have an engineer on site to figure it out. I'm not ready to divulge our solution, because honestly I'm not sure we want to replicate it. The point is, if I had not been here, this would be a delay of game more than it already is. Well, I earned my pay yesterday.

Building Goodwill

What do I do on these business trips I am always taking? Well, that's classified confidential. (Ha! Inside joke.)

Wet Day at the Office

However, I would like to write in general about an intangible aspect of my travels, building goodwill through enhanced communication, customer understanding, and direct support. I think this applies to really any brand, how do you build that brand? Well, you can get a marketing degree to figure that out, but one extremely effective method is being there in person with a customer, particularly when things are not going well. Sometimes in my current role that means I need to be out in a muddy forest two days after 11 inches of rain fell.

It's not rocket science but it does cost money to be there in person, so it's not free you do have to earn it. The other side is, I typically travel when something is broken or not working right, so there is always an aspect of calming things down and having a fix for the problem. So in short, a big part of my business travels are building goodwill.

Replacing the Battery

When this is over I may write a better write up of the experience, but for tonight, just a taste. In the spirit of Back to the Future day I'm working on my strange looking car's propulsion system. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as cool as Mr. Fusion.

Well I ripped into my 2002 Honda Insight and started to replace the 75 pound hybrid battery. The battery has been bad for a month, and I finally bought the replacement which cost more than I paid for the car. The good news is, I'm learning a lot about Honda engineering. They use what appear to be M4s all with 10 mm hex heads, and these neat washers built on the bolt.

Sure I'm sure it must be a little expensive but you can't drop just a washer. Plus, using just the one wrench size is really great. Also, their welding frankly isn't that impressive.

One More Day...

I'm growing to despise the word "more". Why? Because it never ends. More is always increasing. More has happened twice on my current trip. I'm happy to provide the support that I am, that's why I have extended the trip, it is good that I am here. Yet... It is tiring waking up early most days, physically working most of the day, going for a run, then eating out at some strange restaurant, and going to bed in a strange hotel bed.

So tomorrow is the last day I expect to be here, this week. I was recommended to try Georgia Peaches while I am here... Everyone is quite nice and the work we are doing is actually the first of it's kind that has ever been done, which is exciting, for at least one more day.

Bad Toilet Handle Design

I've been seeing these water saving toilets recently, and their design is not great. 

A Round Handle?

This handle should be paddle shaped so that it can only move up or down in one dimension, not so that you can still move it in two dimensions up and down or back and forth. Plus, the stickers on the actual toilet don't seem to make sense, does it mean strait up or up towards the back? A paddle design that only goes up or down would be much better. That being said I'm not sure what sort of internal plumbing changes might be required. There is probably a reason they stuck with the old style handles. 

That being said, it's a great intention to try and save water, we Americans waste so much!

I'm pointing this out because is it design, is it engineering? Certainly it's a cross functional team, and I think they can do better. Sometimes you don't know the best way to do something until it gets out in the field, and this is a nice simple example that can help convey the kind of decisions that engineers and design people make about form and function every day. Don't get me started on faucets... they's generally horrible.