Diy at it’s best

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ggunn said:
Well, I have a BSEE, but for the first 20 years of my career as an engineer I worked in semiconductors where conductor dimensions are measured in fractions of a micron and everything is very low voltage switched DC. When I made the transition to solar design engineering I had to learn a whole lot of electrician stuff.
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I have a BSEE, but never did circuit design or build after school.
Migrated to the power and energy concentration early in college
Some of the stuff Gar gets into left me and was forgotten at the FE stage…

I see young engineers now that interview and we ask them “What are the expected voltages on a 277/480 delta bank”
Some get it, some don‘t..
The real fun begins when they get to calculating…
 
Hv&Lv said:
I have a BSEE, but never did circuit design or build after school.
Migrated to the power and energy concentration early in college
Some of the stuff Gar gets into left me and was forgotten at the FE stage…

I see young engineers now that interview and we ask them “What are the expected voltages on a 277/480 delta bank”
Some get it, some don‘t..
The real fun begins when they get to calculating…
Click to expand...
At least you've had the chance to forget it.
 
You get little practical application info in undergrad EE. Most EE's should have had a basic circuits and electronics class, but switches were rarely ever on the diagrams. Just current sources, resistors, and maybe a capacitor, coil, or transistor. There was usually a lab to go with that class where you build simple stuff on breadboard. These were frustrating, as many students burned up components and put them back in the bin. I could quickly grab the correct resistor because I knew the color code well, but they were also typically in the wrong bin. Its a wonder people got their stuff to work.

It was also difficult for me at first since I had been building electronic things since 8th grade but didn't understand the theory deeper than following the circuit pathways. I worked with voltage sources not current sources. None of my conductors were "ideal".

It was interesting to watch some students in these labs. You could tell which ones had never held a screwdriver before. It was interesting to listen to them trying to convert the class theory into actual wires and components. I was always frustrated later in life with the engineers who never built much on their own. Some of them still can't connect their stereo equipment. I wish they would put engineers through a basic building course where you work with frame a roof, build a strut rack, run some plumbing pipe, do some wiring, take apart a machine, etc. Or maybe work on a car or motorcycle going through all the mechanical and electrical systems.

Even finding people who can solder now days seems difficult. I had some phone and data filters installed in some rooms and they had solder tail leads. None of the electricians could solder. They mickey moused some spade terminal connections which were OK. I was going to solder them, but was afraid of the Vesda smoke detection in the room so I didn't. Would have been quicker and better than the sloppy spades.
 
ggunn said:
Well, I have a BSEE, but for the first 20 years of my career as an engineer I worked in semiconductors where conductor dimensions are measured in fractions of a micron and everything is very low voltage switched DC. When I made the transition to solar design engineering I had to learn a whole lot of electrician stuff.
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Designing integrated circuits is also a different world because it's not the number of devices that you try to minimize but instead the total area that they take on a chip, because then you can get more die from each wafer for a lower cost.
Also, tolerances of on-chip components are typically not very tight, but the matching between components on the same chip is quite good. And so on-chip topologies for analog circuits are usually very different from those using discrete components because of the need to exploit this advantage of on-chip component matching. Of course, digital techniques are also very effective on a chip because the area that they take keeps acaling down with new process generations.

One of the first and certainly the most well known engineer to exploit this on-chip component matching was the legendary Bob Widlar:
https://www.google.com/search?q=bob...HVvRDb4Q_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1117&bih=933&dpr=1
 
suemarkp said:
Even finding people who can solder now days seems difficult. I had some phone and data filters installed in some rooms and they had solder tail leads. None of the electricians could solder.
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Yeah, it's a different world. I couldn't have been more than 10 years old when I soldered the components of this Knight-Kit walkie-talkie:
http://mcrn3885.com/radiopix/knightkit/CB/knightc555esc100cbwalkietalkieyyys.jpg

Heathkits, Knight-Kits, and building circuits from scavenged parts from discarded TVs and radios provided a lot of soldering practice. The tiny surface mounted components of today make hand soldering very difficult and often impractical.
 
"I wish they would put engineers through a basic building course"

What I always wished for in my previous occupation was for the 'engineer' who designed a piece of gear to be forced to service it, at 2 AM, in a cold drafty shack (at the base of a 700-ft lightning rod), with one 60-watt light bulb, no workbench, one flat'blade, one Phillips, one side cutter, one needle-nose, and a wire stripper.

Nothing else except maybe a good soldering station. I'd bet things would be designed a bit differently...........
 
Times change...

I also built HeathKits as a kid, and the school I went to had a both a rotating machines lab in the EE building (with a beautiful old switchboard) and a first-class machine shop in the MechEng building where the ME students were required to spend at least a semester learning how to make things. 'course, this was also the era of on-site component-level repair on electronics. And rocks were still soft :ROFLMAO:.
 
Ah, yes, dragging discarded TV carcasses home to salvage resistors and power transformers and tube sockets. (And 1B3-1D3-1G3 tubes till we found out they were pretty much useless for anything outside the TV !!)

Unsoldering 100K screen grid resistors (tube TV's musta had 30 or 40 per chassis) and trying to drill out the rivets on brown bakelite sockets without 'going too deep' and cracking the mounting ears all to pieces.

Thanks for the memories !
 
OldBroadcastTech said:
Ah, yes, dragging discarded TV carcasses home to salvage resistors and power transformers and tube sockets. (And 1B3-1D3-1G3 tubes till we found out they were pretty much useless for anything outside the TV !!)
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I did once use a 1B3 tube to rectify a neon sign transformer and charge up a high voltage capacitor. I remember placing some metal in front of it as a shield from any X-rays that might be generated.
 
OldBroadcastTech said:
Ah, yes, dragging discarded TV carcasses home to salvage resistors and power transformers and tube sockets. (And 1B3-1D3-1G3 tubes till we found out they were pretty much useless for anything outside the TV !!)

Unsoldering 100K screen grid resistors (tube TV's musta had 30 or 40 per chassis) and trying to drill out the rivets on brown bakelite sockets without 'going too deep' and cracking the mounting ears all to pieces.

Thanks for the memories !
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It was the power transformers I was after. That was the most expensive component of the tube amps I built for my guitar-playing buddies. I won a gold medal in a vo-tech competition for one of them. It was a Fender Showman clone.

I converted an old b&w TV into a ‘scope once. It was an interesting experiment to prove the concept, but had no real practical use.
 
OldBroadcastTech said:
"I wish they would put engineers through a basic building course"

What I always wished for in my previous occupation was for the 'engineer' who designed a piece of gear to be forced to service it, at 2 AM, in a cold drafty shack (at the base of a 700-ft lightning rod), with one 60-watt light bulb, no workbench, one flat'blade, one Phillips, one side cutter, one needle-nose, and a wire stripper.

Nothing else except maybe a good soldering station. I'd bet things would be designed a bit differently...........
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FWIW, when I made the move from semiconductors into PV design, I spent the first three months or so working on an installation crew. It gave me an appreciation for that part of the process that I bring into my designs to this day.
 
ggunn said:
FWIW, when I made the move from semiconductors into PV design, I spent the first three months or so working on an installation crew. It gave me an appreciation for that part of the process that I bring into my designs to this day.
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every engineer (not just EE's) should need to spend some time working on the types of things they design.

Take automobiles and just regular maintenance not that many vehicles can you take off the oil filter without making a mess. First thing is why place it in a non vertical position, it is going to spill oil as soon as seal is broken. If not going to make it vertical at least position it so that oil can be caught in a drip pan without splashing onto some other component(s) before it falls far enough to catch in the drip pan.
 
kwired said:
every engineer (not just EE's) should need to spend some time working on the types of things they design.

Take automobiles and just regular maintenance not that many vehicles can you take off the oil filter without making a mess. First thing is why place it in a non vertical position, it is going to spill oil as soon as seal is broken. If not going to make it vertical at least position it so that oil can be caught in a drip pan without splashing onto some other component(s) before it falls far enough to catch in the drip pan.
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On my Chrysler Sebring the battery compartment is inside the front left wheelwell. I have to jack up the car and remove the left front wheel to access it. On the 1976 MGB I used to drive, in order to replace the driver's side motor mount I had to remove the entire rack and pinion steering assembly at the wheels and firewall to get to the single nut that secured the mount to the frame.
 
kwired said:
every engineer (not just EE's) should need to spend some time working on the types of things they design.

Take automobiles and just regular maintenance not that many vehicles can you take off the oil filter without making a mess. First thing is why place it in a non vertical position, it is going to spill oil as soon as seal is broken. If not going to make it vertical at least position it so that oil can be caught in a drip pan without splashing onto some other component(s) before it falls far enough to catch in the drip pan.
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22C8088F-1EE5-43B7-B010-B52799823543.jpeg
 
ggunn said:
On my Chrysler Sebring the battery compartment is inside the front left wheelwell. I have to jack up the car and remove the left front wheel to access it. On the 1976 MGB I used to drive, in order to replace the driver's side motor mount I had to remove the entire rack and pinion steering assembly at the wheels and firewall to get to the single nut that secured the mount to the frame.
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We had a Dodge Stratus for the kids at one time and battery was also inside front left wheel well.
Hv&Lv said:
View attachment 2559770
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I've seen that one before. Is a good one though.
 
kwired said:
We had a Dodge Stratus for the kids at one time and battery was also inside front left wheel well.
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I'm not surprised. The Stratus is virtually the same car as my Chrysler Sebring.
 
Hv&Lv said:
View attachment 2559770
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You shouldn't have to remove the intake manifold to change a spark plug. :mad:

My SIL's high-mileage van had a misfire code on one of the cylinders in the back. What should have been an easy troubleshooting job was going to take up $1K in labor just to get to the back three sparkplugs/coils. She junked the vehicle, which should have had another 100K miles left in her.
 
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