Thread: I get asked to design the strangest things----

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This spring, I will have 43 years in as a design engineer. Over that time span, I have designed any number of weird, wacky, and wonderfull machines. Of course, the first 36 years, I worked for large engineering companies, and designed whatever product they were selling. The last seven years, I have been working from home as an independent consultant, and I am absolutely amazed at the range of different things that I get involved with. I work with a few inventors, and much of the developmental work that I help them with is proprietary, so I can't say too much about it. In the last 3 months, I have worked on manipulating devices to assist line workers at General Motors to lift heavy automotive parts into place on the assembly line, a machine that raises and lowers the lighting arrays on 100 foot tall lamp posts (like you see in the big chain store parking lots) so that the bulbs can be changed without renting a crane, a pair of machines for making jig saw puzzles, a spill proof watering dish for a dog,----and, the strangest one so far----I went to Oakville this week, and talked to a prospective customer about a cookie dough mixing machine. Damn, I never really thought much about cookies!!! I can remember my mom, rolling out the dough with a rolling pin, and cutting out cookies with an old tin can with one end removed.--But I'm talking about mass produced cookies---millions of cookies. Every grocery store that you go into across USA and Canada, and I suppose cities all over the world, there are always fresh cookies for sale. The dough is mixed in 1500 pound batch lots, dumped into a stainless steel hopper, and then goes thru a series of extruder rolls, shaping orifices, orbiting guillotine knives onto a conveyor and into an oven or off to be frozen and sold as "ready to cook" frozen cookie dough. A large industrial size cookie dough maker costs upwards of $250,000.00 and is all PLC controlled. Who'd a thunk it!!! The customer I spoke with wants me to design a "scaled down" cookie dough maker, and has a budget of $100,000.00 to spend. No wonder I still work every day. This stuff is too much fun to stop!!! ---Brian

Hey Brian!!!!! Any chance you could get me a deal at wholesale on a bunch of chocolate chip cookies????? Having too many chocolate chip cookies would be liking having too much horsepower......can't imagine it ever happening to me!!!!!!!

someone mention COOKIES?????????????

Originally Posted by flh4speed

someone mention COOKIES?????????????

Hey!!!!!! Don't ya be putting pictures of me on the site unless you ask first!!!!!!! Geez!!!!! I gets no respect.....

Darned you Brian, you made me run out to the store and pickup some chocolate chip cookies! Worth the trip though, thanks.

Don

You certainly do not have to worry about getting bored working on the same thing everyday, now if you just put into your contract that you get free samples of the items made by the devices you create you will have it made!

COOKIES, COOKIES give me COOKIES

It's nice to have variety in your work. Sounds you've been involved with alot of very interesting projects. But with the cookies, remember: all things in moderation

Brian, You have my dream job. I've done a lot of equipement design in the past and I hope to do more in the future. But right now I have to build every thing I design. I just want to design the stuff.

This is a dream job.---This spring is my 43rd year!!! I particularly have enjoyed the last 7 years working on my own. Next week I start a 2 month contract on some big machine that was built in Germany and purchased by a company in Canada. The relationship between the 2 companies went off the rail some time a few years ago, and now the German company has gone out of business. Now the Canadian company wants me to "reverse engineer" the machine and create new mechanical details of it, to produce a new machine.

Brian,

My Son is just starting (well, he's in his 4th Year) in your business-I am truly amazed at what Designers do, at what must be going through their minds when they design, and how do they keep it fresh. I sometimes have trouble trying to figure out how to make a bracket to hold stuff on my build .

I think most Designers are first-borns, because first-borns are typically creative-as posted earlier, I think it's great because you are always doing something different every day-

Originally Posted by brianrupnow

This is a dream job.---This spring is my 43rd year!!! I particularly have enjoyed the last 7 years working on my own. Next week I start a 2 month contract on some big machine that was built in Germany and purchased by a company in Canada. The relationship between the 2 companies went off the rail some time a few years ago, and now the German company has gone out of business. Now the Canadian company wants me to "reverse engineer" the machine and create new mechanical details of it, to produce a new machine.

That's all really kewl Brian... BUT WHERE ARE THE COOKIES!!!!!!! ????????

Originally Posted by Dave Severson

That's all really kewl Brian... BUT WHERE ARE THE COOKIES!!!!!!! ????????

Did you notice he changed the subject hoping everybody would forget about the cookies. Someone should check and see if the milkman made an extra large delivery to his house!! That is a surefire way to find out if he is hoarding all the cookies.

Hmmmm... Ahhhh... Cookies! Wal Mart has pretty good chocolate chip cookies in their bakery. Ooh, Snickerdoodles. No, white chocolate macadamia nut. Wait! The only thing better than that is original Toll House chocolate chip... I'll be back in a while; I need to run to the store right now...

Haven't heard back from the "cookie customer". Sometimes guys go into sticker shock when they see what an automated machine with PLC controls really costs, and I never hear from them again. If its a machine shop wanting to build a machine for a customer, then fine, they just pass the design costs on to the customer. However if its a guy who wants a machine built for his own use, and he has to eat the costs himself, quite often I put in a preliminary cost estimate, along with an estimated design cost, and they dissapear, just like magic!!!