Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

Learning all the time: your career learning path

design-engine

New member
What are you going to learn next? I make it a point to practice learning and learning may be the root of all happiness if you think about it. Smarter you are the more your not happy learning. If you know me personally you know I make learning a life passion. Working at a school makes you want others to practice learning too. I make it a point for example to over the winter holidays to learn something significant One year it was Unigraphics another it was cabling in Pro/E.


Im trying to think whats next? Catia? Maybe I brake down and buy a CNC machine What's on your career learning path? I maybe leaning towards a new module in Creo.
 
I've been noodling around with Onshape on my phone. Remember in the old, old days when we'd get excited when someone finally figured out how to bring Pro/E up on a laptop offsight somewhere? Now you can model something anywhere just standing around on the corner.

It's only got basic features, a little buggy, and maybe still a bit of a novelty, but it's still pretty cool to be doing it right in the palm of your hand. I would imagine that what's next is a gesture control or even retina control version for some type of augmented reality, so you'll be flailing around modeling something while walking down the street.

Anyway I suppose the key is to get enough amateurs and dilettantes going on it, then maybe have some sort of a cloud optimization service like Autodesk Within clean it up for fabrication, 3D printing, sharing on some social network, etc.

Maybe this opens up an opportunity to capture the low end students with some sort of web based subscription teaching the basics or perhaps sponsoring collaborative social networked teams like public Slack teams.
 
I noticed that this forum and many others we belong to are slowing down.... possibly due to other forms of social media not sure. But my question was geared to get people thinking and interacting.

Even dross is interacting by wishing me to use spell checker LOL By the way the articles that we post on http://www.designengine.com all get proofed by someone. I was hoping I could be less attentive on spelling and grammar and just get my thoughts out for real change. Hopefully the engineers on the forum who don't speak English so well or English as a second language are not so careful.

Maybe we can cheer on some real thinking and make/force some change in this industry. Solidworks still does not auto dimension sketch for example basing their decisions on 15 year old research conducted on advanced Pro/ENGINEER users at the time who were slow to go to intent manager for example. We know program managers and programmers alike see these forums because I often get the call or mention at a conference stating such.

I have been trying to get PTC to mature a next step for sketcher mode try where the system would try to learn how we organize dimensions. For example, if you either dimension two arcs with radius dims or x & y dimensions.... At design engine we teach to use sketcher handles (a strait line forced tangent & construction but the default way Creo sketcher dimensions those is not with an angle & length of the handle but with one x or y dim and an angle. Simple differences like this would make for a much faster sketcher workflow. In 1998 when I first mentioned it they laughed and asked if I knew how expensive that would be to program. It was to a room of 200 engineers. My response was 'my cellphone does it' Someone at PTC will figure it out and 'run with it' and probably get a promotion (not a raise) ;)

Another addition to sketcher ... If a designer owns ISDX they should have special tools inside their sketcher for G2 & G3 continuity... grayed out for those who don't won ISDX so they can ask their VAR what that is (VARS like to get engaged because they sell more) . Every 5 years they switch out Product line managers and they are all probably over worked.
 
Last edited:
Okay, I went to your site and went to a story that you wrote. Here is the first sentence:

"If your starting to feel your smartphone doesn’t deliver high enough quality images, the L16 camera, by new silicone valley startup Light, may be the next best solution."

Now, if this has been proofed, why isn't "your" either "you are" or "you're", either of which is correct.
Secondly, the "silicone valley" should have been "Silicon Valley", so it was both spelled wrong and did not have capital letters.

Looked at a few other stories, found the same kind of mistakes.
For someone that wants to project the image that they are experts in a subject and that purport to teach, they should project an image of someone that has at least finished grade school grammar and spelling.
 
If you guys find my spelling irritating on the forum wait till you meet me in person. I pronounce most everything correctly but with a southern drawl. I'm definitely a personality to say the least and like cheese i get better with age.
 
Last edited:
I think my next endevor will have to be Rhino...not by choice but by demand. Bart...do you or your colleagues know of a decent and comprehensive tutorial for Rhino that won't take a year to go through?
 
Well, we teach Rhino at Design engine. the class costs twice as much as the software costs LOL I like it as a consultant that my software actually cost a lot. As far as resources there are probably a lot out there.
 
Last edited:
Most of my recent learning has been been more hands on lab & field testing. Hours peering through microscopes at wear surfaces and fractures. Spent 4 years getting a liquefied natural gas fuel injector from concept to production with a life expectancy of 1 billion cycles, very little flow change and no leakage. Had never worked with LNG before, all my previous decades of experience were with gasoline and diesel. Those are a piece of cake compared to LNG. Most people think gasoline is more of a solvent than a lubricant but it's a great lubricant compared to LNG which is basically nothing but methane. Even CNG has much better lubrication as it has some propane and hexane and a few parts per million of compressor oil. One billion cycles is right off the endurance limit charts too, most fatigue models assume that if something has not broken by 10 million it never will but there are some failure modes that are just getting started at 250 million. Of course oil prices tanked right after our production release so we may never sell as many as we had hoped but there are still many parts of the world with such severe pollution problems that they are banning diesels. Right now, all our production is going into India and China.

So I'm still using my tried and true Wildfire 4 but we don't make lofted surfaces or artsy shapes. I need relatively easy to use dead reliable tools for production drawings, surfaces need not apply.
 
I believe we have buses running on natural gas in Chicago, and PACE just ordered some out in the suburbs.

The story of the guy who built the LNG terminal in Louisiana is pretty interesting
He locked in all his profits before the prices crashed, and, even though prices are still crashing, they're still going through with everything because of the political push. It looks like it's one of those cases like computers where prices drop real low but the technology takes off faster.
 
sound really interesting. Liquefied natural gas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquefied_natural_gas) fuel injector. Is that a work project or home work project? Anything we can do to help you promote it?

Oh, it's been very interesting, a real learning experience. It's definitely a work project, something like this takes a lot of money. We had a customer come to us with their requirements and agree to pay some of the development costs. They helped with a lot of the testing too.
 
I thought that when LNG is used, the liquid is allowed to expand to gaseous state at lower pressure and then is presented to the fuel injector.
Are there two methods for using LNG, both in its liquid and gaseous state?
 
I thought that when LNG is used, the liquid is allowed to expand to gaseous state at lower pressure and then is presented to the fuel injector.
Are there two methods for using LNG, both in its liquid and gaseous state?

LNG gets vaporized before the fuel injectors (at least every one I've been involved with). The difference between LNG and CNG is that LNG is essentially 100% pure methane while CNG can have quite a wide range of composition. In addition to the other hydrocarbons (ethane, butane, propane, etc.) it can have significant amounts of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, etc. The big difference between the two from an injector design standpoint though is CNG picks up a few parts per million of compressor oil which, scant as it is, has vastly better lubrication than LNG. Parts that virtually last forever on CNG will wear out in less than 50 million cycles on LNG. We only had to change a couple of things in the end to get LNG certification but we ran through about 25 design iterations before we got the right combination.
 
I am switching my attention to project management tools and skills. I am trying to get advantage of Design thinking approach and Agile techniques for my daily duties.

I think I do know pretty much about how to build compex models in Creo, I`ve been improving my skills for last couple of years. Now many problems are automaticaly solved by software itself. Things get even better with newest version of software(in example you can solve 3 sided or 5 sided surfaces in ISDX automaticlay with very accurate results).
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top