Hi, I’m taking the CQE exam later this month and was wondering if the written exam of 160 questions is broken out by sections of the book? Like the body of knowledge? The supplemental study guide has many practice questions but it’s by chapter so it helps to know where in the book to look for the answers or formulas. Since this test is open book I was wondering if that extra perk was actually not a perk at all and it was just 160 randomized questions from any of the sections at any point? Thank you!!

Just joined a small company that provides metrology services.

They use Excel to track 100 items which includes information of serial number, when calibration was done, when cal is due, when verification was done, when ver is due.

Each physical item has a calibration sticker and verification sticker that are hand written.

Issues: it’s so time consuming, it’s prone to human error, and feels like an outdated method.

Aside from this, when these items go to the field, we write down each item, their serial number, sticker info… ect. To have a trace back of what was used for a project. This is also manual and written on a sheet which is prone to errors.

Question is, what do you guys use for asset management and control of items leaving/returning the office?

Thanks!

I am looking for a specification for buried variable temperature pipe for a project I am working on. We have about 500' of buried copper pipe carrying variable temperature glycol. Because of the wide temperature range involved (up to 200F, and as low as winter ambient) there is significant thermal expansion, and PEX could potentially lose its mechanical strength at those temps. Obviously going to add expansion loops at either side, but I am looking for a standard or accepted practice for these types of situations.

Intro

Welcome to the weekly career discussion thread, where you can talk about all career & professional topics. Topics may include:

• Professional career guidance & questions; e.g. job hunting advice, job offers comparisons, how to network

• Educational guidance & questions; e.g. what engineering discipline to major in, which university is good,

• Feedback on your résumé, CV, cover letter, etc.

• The job market, compensation, relocation, and other topics on the economics of engineering.

[Archive of past threads]

Guidelines

1. Before asking any questions, consult the AskEngineers wiki. There are detailed answers to common questions on:

• Job compensation
• Cost of Living adjustments
• Advice for how to decide on an engineering major
• How to choose which university to attend

1. Most subreddit rules still apply and will be enforced, especially R7 and R9 (with the obvious exceptions of R1 and R3)

2. Job POSTINGS must go into the latest Quarterly Hiring Thread. Any that are posted here will be removed, and you'll be kindly redirected to the hiring thread.

3. Do not request interviews in this thread! If you need to interview an engineer for your school assignment, use the list in the sidebar.

Resources

• The AskEngineers wiki

• The AskEngineers Quarterly Salary Survey

• For students: "What's your average day like as an engineer?" We recommend that you spend an hour or so reading about what engineers actually do at work. This will help you make a more informed decision on which major to choose, or at least give you enough info to ask follow-up questions here.

• For those of you interested in a career in software development / Computer Science, go to r/cscareerquestions.

I've seen this before but can't think of how to search for it again. Nothing comes up.

It's a train made of small, material-handling cars. Like a mine train. But it is driven by ground-based roller stations. Like some Hot Wheels cars use to run them around the track.

It can handle steep hills and the video I remember was in the snow.

Hoping someone can help me!

Thanks!

We currently have a very old design that uses a transfer molded insert from 30% Glass Filled diallyl phthalate for a connector. We do not have the molds, which is cost prohibitive, because we are only making 20 parts and cannot afford to make a new transfer mold. Therefore, we would like to machine the inserts from a material that is similar or better electrically, and will resist the heat of soldering. The material also has to be resistant to water absorption as well as flame retardant. I am looking at PEEK and Ultem, or possible FR4 as a cheaper alternative, as these are available in rod form and can be machined. Does anyone else have some good recommendations?

I purchase a 1 inch hex nut for use as a customer facing part. Our internal drawings call the nut out to .985 to 1.005 across the flats. From what I can find, this is standard tolerance for 1 inch nuts, according to the Machinist's Handbook.

The vendor drawing has a tolerance that is .990 to 1.010 across the flats. We are running into a large amount of parts that are failing our internal inspection that the vendor will not accept as returns.

The only potential saving grace for these parts are that they are nylon nuts. I think there is a possibility that there is an existing industry standard tolerance for plastic or Nylon nuts that may be different from the Machinist's handbook or steel nuts. Or even a difference for panel nuts, which this part is.

For the life of me, I have no idea where to find this potential standard, if it even exists. Does anyone here know if I'm even talking sense here? Can you help me find a solution?

Edit for additional information:

The problem here stems from the .985 to 1.005 dimension being called out on customer facing drawings which are more than 30 years old. Some of these drawings are standard items which we can change without concern. Many of them are specials for specific customers and we cannot make changes without a large discussion with customers. The customers will not be interested in allowing the change. The finished part that the nut goes with is in FDA approved product. Any change is a huge and expensive process, and we cannot send out parts that we know don't meet the drawing.

The incoming nuts are inspected to an AQL to for acceptance. If they didn't meet an internal drawing but still met the customer facing drawing, I wouldn't have a problem. But they don't meet either drawing. Because I know they don't meet the detail print or the customer facing print, I cannot accept them as they are.

I am looking for the standards to provide justification for a change so I have something to go to customers with.

UK Engineers what did you earn when? I'm trying to understand how salaries have changed over the years for engineers in the UK and would love to have some data on salaries over the past few decades. If you are an engineer in the UK what was your salary when you started? What year was that? And how has it changed over time?

Edit: Thanks to all those that have posted! To all that are looking at the high salaries of others and feeling bad: Don't worry, salaries aren't everything, and even so your current salary isn't forever if you don't want it to be. Most important is your mental wellbeing, whether you enjoy your job and the people you work with and having low negative stress. In the end, money wise, what is most important is how much you actually take home after taxes and cost of living, and how much you save long term (pension and investments).

I started a new position as a metallurgical engineer a few months ago, and I'm having frustrations trying to format figures in my reports. I write quite a lot of reports and often need to have a grid of images to compare things, something like this:

​

https://preview.redd.it/htcnmqblaxtc1.png?width=891&format=png&auto=webp&s=21b5c13096a297a16e216d97ae80be4522cb1ca9

I made this by using a table with predefined limits to cell size, then dragging and dropping photos into the cells, then adding a caption to the table. The issue is, I don't like how it looks, I want the caption to be aligned with the left side of the figure, but this way the caption is aligned to the page, not the images. I've played around with just inserting images to the document, manually resizing them, changing the layout options to "Top and Bottom" since I never want text next to images, but that requires me manually changing multiple options in "layout" EVERY single time, aligning multiple images with each other before grouping them, then adding captions, then grouping the caption to the grouped images. And don't even get me started on adding subcaptions like above in that case. That method produces better results, as when you add a caption it creates a text box that is the same width as the image, so the caption is aligned correctly. BUT that method also completely fucks up the document since moving images causes everything to jump and mix everywhere and it's a huge mess that rarely works well.

I swear there is no way all engineers just deal with this stuff all day forever and ever, there has to be a way to quickly and easily insert multiple images that are properly spaced, with captions and subcaptions that are aligned the way I described, right? How can I do that??

Hey, I need to figure out how many heating elements to put in a chamber.

The chamber is about 20 sq feet.

Lets assume the R Value of the insulation to be 70.

Lets assume that V=120 and the resistive heating elements are 100 ohms each.

Lets say that we need to go from 25C to 50C.

Lets figure that the chamber should be heated up in about 10 minutes.

Anyone have thoughts on how to bring it all together?

Keeping in mind that I may need to adjust for the makeshift materials I am working with.

Thanks

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to design a piece in Solidworks that is "collapsible (or crushable)" so I am thinking of some origami-shapes I've seen that collapse to leave almost 0-dead volume.

Does anyone have any guideance or reference articles that they could share or any knowledge on making these types of designs?

I'm not sure if this meets the rules for this sub or not. I guess I'll find out if/when it gets removed!

I'm prototyping a device, and I'm looking for small t-bolts like the kind used on pipe clamps. Does anyone know of any companies that sell small (i.e M4/M5 or #8/#10) t-bolts on their own?

I always struggle with tolerancing this type of feature, so I'm looking for the correct way to do it.

it's a 5mm slot on the end of a cylinder. used for orientation. The angle is critical and the slot must be parallel to the new centreline at 2°.

*edit: I have added a link with some more images. OD of the part is 95mm

https://imgur.com/a/ysVYOlc

https://preview.redd.it/l1w5q6926mtc1.png?width=783&format=png&auto=webp&s=2b27c14a126d9803c265e41b9614881e3fb4723f

https://preview.redd.it/mmyyae746mtc1.png?width=641&format=png&auto=webp&s=63af1927253773f876fefdb854a14f05c8038e0f

Intro

Welcome to the weekly career discussion thread, where you can talk about all career & professional topics. Topics may include:

• Professional career guidance & questions; e.g. job hunting advice, job offers comparisons, how to network

• Educational guidance & questions; e.g. what engineering discipline to major in, which university is good,

• Feedback on your résumé, CV, cover letter, etc.

• The job market, compensation, relocation, and other topics on the economics of engineering.

[Archive of past threads]

Guidelines

1. Before asking any questions, consult the AskEngineers wiki. There are detailed answers to common questions on:

• Job compensation
• Cost of Living adjustments
• Advice for how to decide on an engineering major
• How to choose which university to attend

1. Most subreddit rules still apply and will be enforced, especially R7 and R9 (with the obvious exceptions of R1 and R3)

2. Job POSTINGS must go into the latest Quarterly Hiring Thread. Any that are posted here will be removed, and you'll be kindly redirected to the hiring thread.

3. Do not request interviews in this thread! If you need to interview an engineer for your school assignment, use the list in the sidebar.

Resources

• The AskEngineers wiki

• The AskEngineers Quarterly Salary Survey

• For students: "What's your average day like as an engineer?" We recommend that you spend an hour or so reading about what engineers actually do at work. This will help you make a more informed decision on which major to choose, or at least give you enough info to ask follow-up questions here.

• For those of you interested in a career in software development / Computer Science, go to r/cscareerquestions.

Some context: I work as a manager for a design engineering team at a major company.

I also happen to love the IDEA of VR/AR... but never been able to get into it due to a multitude of factors.

Regardless - has anyone used something like a meta quest for engineering work? If so do you have any comments on its usability?

I may possibly be able to justify at least one or two headsets for my team - but I'm not 100% convinced were there yet.

A bit more information we use NX 2212 for both cad and Sim work.

Meaning, if a piece of hardware that gets fastened with two of these fails with some regularity, will there be a chance that these rivnuts will come apart in the hole? It looks fine for two or three uses, but after that I can't see how this will hold up.

We have disc with diameter of 150mm ( oval +-1mm) and want to rotate it by only touching it at the sides. The disk is roughly 1mm. I think of using many rollers but this seems challenging in manufacturing and alignment. My prototype suffers from issues when starting the rotation.

Anyone with creative ideas?

The wrench in the image is deflecting, causing it to slip off of the nut once the jaws have deformed enough, but I'm having a hard time making a diagram to show the forces/moments occurring when torque is applied. Does anyone know of a way to find the forces at the contact points of each jaw when a torque is applied? for reference, the nut is torqued to 2,550 in lbs, and the distance across the flats of the nut is 1.87 in. The wrench is slightly wider, so once force is applied it really only contacts the nut at two points (one point per jaw flat). Thanks for any insight you can provide. https://imgur.com/a/gPC35LM

Hello, my name is Andrew and I’m currently a junior in high school. In 6th grade I designed a way to charge a phone with a bike dynamo (not that revolutionary i know). However, the cause was good as I was trying to find a way to bring electricity to the people of Haiti. They do not have good infrastructure from constant hurricanes. Their main source of transportation is bikes, they use their phones a lot for important things, and very few people have access to electricity. 12 year old me put 2 and 2 together and came up with this solution. Unfortunately I ended up burning out with the project, but I wanted to pick it up again now. I would be very grateful if any of you extremely smart people could help me with my design or even co found a non profit to really get this up and running. I would really appreciate any help, Thank you!

I have stainless at 14ga and I need to use an m6 nut, but it seems like SP-M6-0's aren't purchasable? And SP-M6-1's are a hair too thick for 14ga 304, meaning the surface feature that the sheet metal is supposed to cold-flow into will stick straight through.

Can anyone say, are they still installable if the sheet is thinner than the minimum thickness of the PEM?

Announcement

(no announcements this quarter)

Overview

If you have open positions at your company for engineering professionals (including technologists, fabricators, and technicians) and would like to hire from the r/engineering user base, please leave a comment detailing any open job listings at your company.

Due to the pandemic, there are additional guidelines for job postings. Please read the Rules & Guidelines below before posting open positions at your company. I anticipate these will remain in place until Q4 2021.

We also encourage you to post internship positions as well. Many of our readers are currently in school or are just finishing their education.

Please don't post duplicate comments. This thread uses Contest Mode, which means all comments are forced to randomly sort with scores hidden. If you want to advertise new positions, edit your original comment.

[Archive of old hiring threads]

Top-level comments are reserved for posting open positions!

Any top-level comments that are not a job posting will be removed. However, I will sticky a comment that you can reply to for discussion related to hiring and the job market. Alternatively, feel free to use the Weekly Career Discussion Thread.

Feedback

Feedback and suggestions are welcome, but please message us instead of posting them here.

READ THIS BEFORE POSTING

Rules & Guidelines

1. Include the company name in your post.

2. Include the geographic location of the position along with any availability of relocation assistance.

3. Clearly list citizenship, visa, and security clearance requirements.

4. State whether the position is Full Time, Part Time, or Contract. For contract positions, include the duration of the contract and any details on contract renewal / extension.

5. Mention if applicants should apply officially through HR, or directly through you.

• If you are a third-party recruiter, you must disclose this in your posting.
• While it's fine to link to the position on your company website, provide the important details in your comment.
• Please be thorough and upfront with the position details. Use of non-HR'd (realistic) requirements is encouraged.

1. Pandemic Guidelines:

• Include a percent estimate of how much of the job can be done remotely, OR how many days each week the hire is expected to show up at the office.
• Include your company's policy on Paid Time Off (PTO), Flex Time Off (FTO), and/or another form of sick leave compensation, and details of how much of this is available on Day 1 of employment. If this type of compensation is unknown or not provided, you must state this in your posting.
• Include what type of health insurance is offered by the company as part of the position.

TEMPLATE

!!! NOTE: Turn on Markdown Mode for this to format correctly!

**Company Name:** 

**Location (City/State/Country):** 

**Citizenship / Visa Requirement:** 

**Position Type:** (Full Time / Part Time / Contract)

**Contract Duration (if applicable):** 

**Third-Party Recruiter:** (YES / NO)

**Remote Work (%):** 

**Paid Time Off Policy:** 

**Health Insurance Compensation:** 

**Position Details:** 

(Describe the details of the open position here. Please be thorough and upfront with the position details. Use of non-HR'd (realistic) requirements is encouraged.)

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to do a "Random Vibration Fatigue Analysis" on a bracket assembly that is mounted on the headboard of a pickup truck.

BACKGROUND:

The bracket assembly is mounted on the headboard of the truck using 2xbolts (1 per each mount). The truck regularly travels on a rough rocky terrain that causes a lot of vibrations. The bracket assembly has been failing before its expected life.

I'm trying to simulate this in FEA to identify the weak spots, compare the life suggested by FEA to what we're actually getting, modify the design accordingly, and then re-do the analysis.

HERE'S WHAT I'VE DONE SO FAR:

We bought a couple of tri-axial accelerometers and fixed them at the two(and only) mounts of the bracket assembly. Drove the truck through the rough terrain and recorded the vibration time-history data of both mounts in x, y and z directions.

After that, I converted each of the six 85-minute long time histories into FFTs and then converted FFTs to PSDs using DewesoftX.

Then using Abaqus, in the first step I ran a frequency analysis and extracted natural frequencies and mode shapes of the bracket assy. In steps 2-4 I ran 3x steady-state dynamic(modal) analyses in x, y and z directions with a "Unit Load Curve" of 9.81 amplitude to represent gravity.

I also selected the outputs for "Generalised Displacements and Phase Angles" which are used by Fe-safe.

I then imported the odb file in Fe-safe using the option of "Open Finite Element Model for PSD Analysis", imported the PSD file, and selected Polar(degrees).

After defining the materials to the groups, you get an option to define "length per repeat in seconds".

QUESTIONS:

1. Should I put 85x60= 5100 seconds in length per repeat?

2. If yes, then how do I relate or extrapolate that to get the actual(total) life of the bracket assembly if the truck travels through that terrain(represented by the 85-minute time history) 5 times a day, every day of the year?

3. Am I doing everything correctly?

4. Is there an easier/ better alternative to what I'm trying to achieve?

I would really appreciate elaborate and easy-to-understand answers without jargon.

Thanks. :)

I run a small engineering firm that engineers and supplies conveyor equipment. The guts of our systems are mechanically very well defined and easy to design. However, we also completely design and supply the structure that supports the mechanical equipment. The structural engineering requires more care and time, as each of our systems is unique. We then ultimately have to also produce layout drawings of the structure to share with our fabricator. From this, shop details are then produced so the fabricator can cut and weld the steel.

We've been doing 95% of our work in 2D AutoCad, but I know the shop detail guys convert all our work into a 3D model, then tear in back down into individual parts, so it seems logical to me that it would be way more efficient for us to do our work in 3D to begin with.

The question I want to ask this community is whether anyone else has transitioned from what we're doing, to something better, and what software you used to do so.

It's probably worthwhile to mention also that I am very much against AutoDesk's subscription model, whereby they expect a continuous stream of income from me for minimal gain to my team. I was on the maintenance model back when they had that, and the only change I ever saw during that time was the addition of annoying visual effects, while known bugs continued to persist. We are currently locked in on the last perpetual license version, and I am far more inclined to go to something like FreeCAD or software from pretty much any other company who does not force this model on me.

Thanks for your help everyone!

Intro

Welcome to the weekly career discussion thread, where you can talk about all career & professional topics. Topics may include:

• Professional career guidance & questions; e.g. job hunting advice, job offers comparisons, how to network

• Educational guidance & questions; e.g. what engineering discipline to major in, which university is good,

• Feedback on your résumé, CV, cover letter, etc.

• The job market, compensation, relocation, and other topics on the economics of engineering.

[Archive of past threads]

Guidelines

1. Before asking any questions, consult the AskEngineers wiki. There are detailed answers to common questions on:

• Job compensation
• Cost of Living adjustments
• Advice for how to decide on an engineering major
• How to choose which university to attend

1. Most subreddit rules still apply and will be enforced, especially R7 and R9 (with the obvious exceptions of R1 and R3)

2. Job POSTINGS must go into the latest Quarterly Hiring Thread. Any that are posted here will be removed, and you'll be kindly redirected to the hiring thread.

3. Do not request interviews in this thread! If you need to interview an engineer for your school assignment, use the list in the sidebar.

Resources

• The AskEngineers wiki

• The AskEngineers Quarterly Salary Survey

• For students: "What's your average day like as an engineer?" We recommend that you spend an hour or so reading about what engineers actually do at work. This will help you make a more informed decision on which major to choose, or at least give you enough info to ask follow-up questions here.

• For those of you interested in a career in software development / Computer Science, go to r/cscareerquestions.

I was opening up a bank account on ETrade and it asks me to choose my occupation, which is electrical engineering... let's see, where's the engineering in this list...

​

https://preview.redd.it/a0nbjbyrojrc1.png?width=376&format=png&auto=webp&s=f8d33394630064ab239c63d34a03e9ba4652ea72

I’m working on a pair of goggles that double as night vision and I want to connect them to a small rc car or drone, I need to start with the display. I don’t know much about Osd or flight controllers. Is it possible to overlay an OSD connected straight to a camera mounted to my head? there’s not much info on YouTube or even Google about what I’m trying to get. The only thing I’ve found that looks possible to work is the old MAX7456 and those are sold out everywhere. So my question is, is it possible and if so how and what can I use to display the pitch and yaw my of my head directly from a camera to the tft display?