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A funny video

Funny. Not nearly enough swearing and asking the gods to relegate some nameless engineer to an eternity in hell. Just spent 2 days tearing a starter out of a tractor. One local wrench twister flat out refused to work on it, he had done one before.
 
Boy, I feel your pain. I started my row Crop tractor yesterday to haul grain (yes, my corn is finally coming off). Instant pool of fuel on the ground. Fuel injector leak. That $2000 SOB is buried behind / beneath / surrounded by every other engine part they could find including rusty manifolds, heat shields, and rusty tubing. WTF!

I'm not a happy camper right now. I'm pulling grain wagons with my loader tractor for now at 1mph but I need that big tractor for fall plowing!
 
When I worked in a dealership and a new vehicle type came in we would all stand around looking it over and finding the hardest part to replace. 9/10 that was the part that seemed to fail the most often.
 
6.5 Fan said:
Funny. Not nearly enough swearing and asking the gods to relegate some nameless engineer to an eternity in hell. Just spent 2 days tearing a starter out of a tractor. One local wrench twister flat out refused to work on it, he had done one before.
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I've got an old Ford smallish loader tractor that taking the starter of is real easy IF you have the injector pump off first, but to take the injector pump off you need to have the starter off. It's is so insane, the inside back bolt of the starter is nearly impossible to access. I sure couldn't engineer a fuel pump or a tractor myself but good God man, it isn't rocket science to make components accessible and serviceable.
 
I recently replaced a steering rack on a 2016 Durango. All said and done was 7 hours. It should have been a 1.5 hour job. The input shaft on the rack was ridiculously long, and if they had shortened it by 1" you would not have to remove the front subframe and lift the engine to get it out.
Screenshot_20221123-105909_Samsung Internet.jpg
 
Another factor for engineering is to have a quote personnel that actually know how long it takes to design and manufacture something. At the mold shop where I previously worked, they were quoting 9-week builds. That would be OK if there weren't 50 other tools being built at once. Holidays, weekends... nope, not for over 6 years. Working Christmas day, always. Then they brought in schedulers that thought they could tell you 6 weeks in advance what would be on the machine at a specific time on a day 6 weeks in advance. Busy, so busy they had every available spindle in the city contracted. I am talking 50 CNCs outside the company and the 30 in house.

Then mistakes happen, and it's time to duck when the terminations go out... total shit show.
 
Dabbler said:
I feel this video from both sides. Imagine managing projects where the client wanted something the couldn't be built, and insisting it be built on time and in budget.

Brings back PTSD from the workplace.
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Imagine they wanted something that shouldn't be built..

and you had to be their conscience. Been there, done that, got fired and then rehired
 
Been there, done that. Once had a municipal engineer demand that I come up with a way to supply a 60ft length of 4” pipe, in one piece, sandblasted and epoxy lined on the inside. It was suggested that if he could find us a 3” tall Temporary Foreign Worker it might be possible.
 
I like the ability to do all the jobs - some better than others but a lot of machines are going to - “intellectual property” and they purposely apply crap engineering to
1. Make it fail and you pay for part
2. Make it fail and you pay for part and service as part is not sold
3. Make it fail and you pay for part and service as it is not user “serviceable”
4. Make it fail and nothing is available -Buy new machine
5. Make it fail and the part is available but requires some BS program to get it to work. So pay me!!
 
Susquatch said:
Boy, I feel your pain. I started my row Crop tractor yesterday to haul grain (yes, my corn is finally coming off). Instant pool of fuel on the ground. Fuel injector leak. That $2000 SOB is buried behind / beneath / surrounded by every other engine part they could find including rusty manifolds, heat shields, and rusty tubing. WTF!

I'm not a happy camper right now. I'm pulling grain wagons with my loader tractor for now at 1mph but I need that big tractor for fall plowing!
Click to expand...
I have learned through the years of pulling wrenches on my own vehicles/equipment that the mark of a really good engineer is the ability to look down the road and determine which part will be worked on at any given time. Then they begin the assembly process by suspending that part in a column of air and build the entire vehicle around that part. The true engineering geniuses can design a vehicle so that this is true of every part! At least in my experiences.

Almost as good as the technical writers that used to write the Haynes Manuals. "4 Steps to Replacing Starter". You turn the page Saturday morning, ready to go: Step 1: REMOVE ENGINE FROM CAR.
 
Part of the issue, at least in automobiles, is that often the part is an off the shelf component originally designed for another application. It's cheaper to reuse the already designed component even if it's a PITA to work on later. The manufacturers goal is merely to get it built for the budget allotted, working on it later is someone else's problem. The engineer is tasked with figuring out how to make it all fit together and function and the order of assembly. Not their problem to make it easy to work on either. If you have to jack up the body off the frame to access the bolt to remove the transmission, oh well, it's just ten hours of extra labour to accomplish that (actual problem I had to deal with once). For quite a few years I was the guy who's problem it ended up being and I cursed many an engineer for their designs.

One of the reasons Snap-On and others do so well is the need for special wrenches and tools to work on some idiot engineers design. I have many special wrenches and tools that will never again be used because the offending vehicle is now obsolete. But at the time I bought or made them, it was the only way to get the job done.
 
BMW Rider said:
One of the reasons Snap-On and others do so well is the need for special wrenches and tools to work on some idiot engineers design.
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Yes and no, some of their tools are a godsend that once you use them you won’t go back. I was just talking about their 8 point sockets with the snap on rep this week, as an example. Using a wrench on a diff drain plug can go sour fast, but the sockets make life easy.

But yes, they do make money by offering innovative tools, can’t argue they make niche tools
 
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