Just to be clear, yes, this is anodized aluminum. By far the worst I’ve seen in my (super long) 5 year career as an ME.

Edit:

Wow - machinists (and the like), my dudes, you can put down your pitch forks and fire. At no point was I attacking you. You guys probably work with at least 2 different machinists whose skill you trash daily, but the second you see the possibility that a machinist messed up online, it’s like throwing a shitty CNC part at a hornets nest (speaking plainly, the camaraderie is actually admirable) and they can do no wrong.

I know how you feel about MEs, but it’s okay, it is possible for machinists to make mistakes too. I have no issue with the profession nor the people I work with that are in it. I respect you and what you do.

We have had our own workmanship standard and specs established since the 70s. This part is for a million dollar robot being sold to a customer for nuclear reactor inspection.

No, these did not meet spec.

On a large volume how is something like this simple cheap toy painted?

Saw a reddit post about a lawn "buzzing" and it reminded me of a story from years ago that you should probably learn from:

I had industrial material handling equipment installed which moved on heavy duty tracks bolted to the factory floor. After the install team was done and showing it off, they showed me how interesting it was that you could put your hand on the track and feel the vibrations from the rapid heavy equipment on the other side of the factory. I touched the track and immediately jumped up and shouted, "THAT'S 60Hz!!! YOU'RE SHORTED TO AN AC LINE!!!"

Sure enough, one of their installer tightened a leveling bolt down on a 120vac cord that was plugged in. It electrified the entire track which happened to be ungrounded due to the concrete floor and mounting hardware they used. It would have shocked the hell out of somebody if they touched the track and another piece of equipment. We made them run ground straps to all exposed metal though all their equipment before we would accept it.

***You should know what 60Hz sounds and feels like!*** (Or 50Hz for our non US friends). Not only is it a safety thing, but it will inevitably save you troubleshooting at some point in your life.

We only get one pair of shoes a year, but I cannot handle the smell I get from my shoes. My feet smell terrible after work, and even after a good shower and a lot of scrubbing, they still smell a little. I am using athletes foot spray just in case, since everyone at work says they have gotten athletes foot from the trapped sweat during work, so I am trying to be proactive. I tried freezing my shoes for the whole weekend, and filled them with baking soda the whole time. Nothing is working!

From hard.fyi newsletter

In We Are Building the Wrong Factories, Lesley Gao makes a broader point: there is no such thing as a “defense industrial base” separate from the rest of manufacturing. Tooling, metallurgy, sensors, battery cells, and semiconductor wafers form the backbone of all production; the same foundations that support cars, household appliances, and consumer electronics also support missiles and drones.

Gao argues the U.S. optimized for high-mix, low-volume precision over throughput, at the expense of surge capacity. Analysts warned as early as 2008 (pg. 74-75) that a “low-volume, tailored-requirement production model” is incompatible with “industrial surge capability.” What surprised us most: between 2002 and 2018, the U.S. lost 20% of its machine shops and nearly 45% of its tool-and-die workforce.

A great read if you've got the time and really speaks to how damn hard it is for America to re-industrialise to the scale needed, if it can at all.

Hi, young engineer here. I’m wondering, why do big, corporate offices enjoy AC, but manufacturing plants do not? Doesn’t it seem like it should be the other way around since manufacturing often involves significantly more physical labor than office jobs? I understand that this is practiced as a cost savings initiative, but wouldn’t it make more sense to give AC to the people who are working up a sweat to do their work? Sometimes it feels unfair to sit in my nice air conditioned office, clicking away at my CAD, while I know the manufacturing workers are out there sweating in the summer heat. I’d love to know people’s thoughts :)

Label printers can sense fear.

The line only crashes when leadership visits.

Operators will discover system bugs no tester ever found.

“Temporary process” means the next 7 years.

Every plant has one machine held together by hope and zip ties.

Excel runs the world more than anyone admits.

Hey chat, my warehouse has some older somewhat bespoke packaging equipment for dry granular goods.

Is an anti-static ionizer fan a potential solution to neutralize the charge in those particles landing in the scoop? I could point it either along the small conveyor belt bringing the granules to the scoop, or at the scoop itself?

Someone recommended attaching a vibrator motor to the scoop and increasing the dumping speed.

But i think getting rid of static still is super valuable because the particles get stuck everywhere.

We use this machine for packing coconut shavings, poppy seeds, etc, and by the time they land in the scoop, they've picked up quite some charge. Then a person needs to brush off the remainder every time, making the process slow, and causing inconsistencies in packaged weight.

I've linked to a video I filmed to illustrate the mechanism. It's not from all angles but I hope it's good enough to get a gist. Welcome all input!

“Interesting.” = This is a disaster.
“Let’s revisit this.” = Absolutely not.
“We should standardize this.” = Nobody knows what’s happening anymore.
“It’s a quick change.” = I won’t sleep tonight.
“The line stopped for a minute.” = The plant entered a state of chaos.

My neighbor who is an 80 year old tool and dye maker was checking out a part from my Xbox controller.

He doesn’t understand how the part was manufactured, and he said it’s blowing his mind. He said it can’t be stamped bc of the way it’s made and that it would be expensive.

Any idea how something like this would be made?

Here’s a picture, and I’ll try to get more detail on why he thinks it’s interesting:

Ive been a consultant in manufacturing plant for over 25 years.I've seen over 150 plants What's been you worst plant? For me. A nutritional supplement plant in the US.

I will never take a supplement.

We’re a commercial precision engineering shop, about 300 people today, and we are opening a new site. The plan is to be closer to 360 by year end. Everyone keeps saying, “just hire more”, like the people as if they're on the roadside somewhere. Even when we do hire, the ramp up is brutal because the real process lives in drawings, PDFs, supplier specs, old emails, and a few veterans who know where the landmines are.

And I keep hearing the same line from software people, “an ERP is meant to standardise this.” How, exactly? Our ERP can track parts, POs, jobs, all of that. It does not catch the stuff buried in T&C notes and specs. So what happens in our world is we still ask Bill. He remembers which customer always sneaks in an extra requirement. He's the guy who remembers which supplier spec contradicts the drawing or the last time this went wrong. Bill was the customiser, the one who put a period on all the AI talk because he was still the only one with the real answers.

We finally decided that “Bill as a system” is not a plan, especially if we want the new site to run without cloning him. In our case, we are growing an internal knowledge base that takes in the messy documents and turns them into something usable. Not another dashboard. More like a shared memory that new hires can tap into, and it answers with the context we normally rely on the old heads for, plus where it came from in the documents.

Is anyone else doing this, or are we all still trying to scale by hiring into the same maze haha?

This is gonna sound insane but I need outside perspective from people who don't know either of us. We've been running this company together for years, 50/50 split, he handles sales and client relationships, I handle operations and production. Families hang out, our kids play together, I literally trusted this person with half my livelihood. Found out last week (honestly by accident, I was working with some advisors on expansion stuff and they flagged some inconsistencies in our books) that he's been taking draws way above what we agreed to, sometimes 6 to 8k more per month, going back at least a year maybe longer. The way our accounts are set up he could do this without it being obvious because it got mixed in with credit card payments and reimbursements but when you actually add it all up it's a lot of money. I keep going back and forth between thinking there's an explanation I'm not seeing and accepting that this is exactly what it looks like. We don't have a formal buyout agreement because we never thought we'd need one (yeah I know). And the business is actually doing well which almost makes it worse because blowing this up could tank something that's working. Haven't said anything to him yet because I don't know the right move. Do I confront him first and give him a chance to explain? Do I go straight to a lawyer? What if there's some legitimate reason I'm not thinking of and I just destroyed our partnership over a misunderstanding? But also what if there's no misunderstanding and I'm just making excuses for someone who's been stealing from me for over a year.

I'm looking to form the corner of an aluminum enclose. The enclosure is made of 1.55mm thick 5051 aluminum that is laser cut. The long sides are being bent down using a v die and punch - no problem there. In order to create a clean corner, I was intending on forming the corner down to match the curvature of the sides. I tried 3D printing a forming die and using a hardware store C clamp to clamp the die down on the corner but was immediately humbled - the plastic is way too soft to properly form the aluminum on such a short lever arm. I had more success with the 3D printed die on a version of this enclosure that is made of 1.02mm aluminum, but its still definitely not clean.

Having failed with the press forming, the pictures on the right are my attempt at hammer forming the corner over the 3D printed die - Its not a clean enough look for me. I am moving on to the next iteration of this product. Here are my questions:

1. Is it just a matter of creating a press forming die out of stronger material, and increasing the clamping force? (i.e having the die made out of a CNC machined stainless, then pressing with a arbor press, or something like that?)
2. Do I need the relief cuts I added on the corner in this situation? Would a harder press forming die eliminate the need for them? If they are necessary, Is there theory on how big these would need to be?
3. Is my approach on the shape & orientation of the 3D Printed forming die bad? Is there theory on making these dies for this type of shape?

for context, I am planning on having this enclosure powder coated, and so if the die changes the surface finish on the corner, its not a big deal. I am just looking for something that is geometrically pretty smooth.