odd things simple fix

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kwired

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Originally Posted by charlie b My brother in law told a story from his military days of a problem with a new turboprop aircraft. He was stationed in an area that had lots of wind, enough to cause the props to spin, making it impossible for the maintenance crews to do any work on the engine. They sent out a request for proposals for a braking system that would keep the props from rotating with the wind. Several suggestions for multi-million dollar systems were submitted. Then one day, someone stuck a broom handle in the prop housing. Problem solved.


Reminds me of a story I think I got from this site some time ago. Can't seem to find it though, but was a story about a production line and they were having problems with empty boxes showing up at the end of the line. They spent many many dollars on engineering and researching to find a solution to this problem and their results ended up shutting down the entire line when an empty box was detected. Later some of those involved in the design came to check out how it worked had found that an operator came up with a solution of pointing a simple $20 household fan at the conveyor that would blow empty boxes off the conveyor instead of shutting down the whole line, because it was much simpler then having to start up the system again just for an empty box here and there.

I found the story, it is funnier if you read original content then my recollection I mentioned before. I don't know if this is a true story or not, but I'm sure I got it from this forum several years ago and was from a "value engineering" topic of discussion.

here it is:

Valueengineering at its best:

A toothpaste factory hada problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tubeinside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, andpeople with experience in designing production lines will tell youhow difficult it is to have everything happen with timing so precisethat every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time.Small variations in the environment (which can?t be controlled in acost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checkssmartly distributed across the line so that customers all the waydown to the supermarket don?t get ticked-off and buy anotherproduct instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEOof the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company togetherand they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire anexternal engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, astheir engineering department was already too stretched to take on anyextra effort.

The project followed the usual process: budgetand project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and sixmonths (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution ? ontime, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a greattime. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scalesthat would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste boxwould weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone hadto walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing anotherbutton when done to re-start the line.

A while later, the CEOdecides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! Noempty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were putin place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining marketshare. ?That?s some money well spent!? ? he says, beforelooking closely at the other statistics in the report.

Itturns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0, afterthree weeks of production use. It should?ve been picking up atleast a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with thereport. He launched an investigation, and after some work, theengineers come back saying the report was actually correct. Thescales really weren't picking up any defects, because all boxes thatgot to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, theCEO traveled down to the factory, and walked up to the part of
the line wherethe precision scales were installed.

A few feet before thescale, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing any empty boxes off of thebelt and into a bin.

?Oh, that,? says one of the workers ??one of the guys put it there ?cause he was tired of walking overevery time the bell rang.
 

ggunn

PE (Electrical), NABCEP certified
Location
Austin, TX, USA
Occupation
Electrical Engineer - Photovoltaic Systems
A computer science prof I had was fond of telling this story:

A microprocessor manufacturer established a task force to optimize one of their products. The leader of the engineering team tasked with making the improvement decided that the way to do this would be to crunch the code that the processor typically had to handle and redesign the internal execution unit logic of the chip to more efficiently process the most often executed instruction. He analyzed tons of data and extracted the machine code for the instructions processed, and he saw that there was one particular instruction that far and away was the most often executed by the processor, but he did not look up what that instruction actually was until after the redesign was in place and silicon was being processed.

The instruction was "WAIT".
 

ActionDave

Chief Moderator
Staff member
Location
Durango, CO, 10 h 20 min from the winged horses.
Occupation
Licensed Electrician
Something happened to the standard size toilet paper roll.....it got shorter and bigger in circumference. That had a severe negative impact on the vintage, two roll TP holder in our shop......

A couple short pieces of 1 1/4 sch. 80 PVC reamed out with a round file and an entire TP holder remove and replacement procedure was avoided. Good thing too, had things got out of hand someone would have had to make a trip to the hardware store and someone would have to clean the bathroom......my truck was pinned in.
 
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