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You should have the chief engineer approve the parameters before the order is accepted, and checklists and such should be prepared before manufacturing begins. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

Microfluidics has been a disappointment for decades, mostly because mixing of flowing streams is not possible in micro lengths at the very low Reynolds numbers typically achieved. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

Why do you need such specialized document forms at all? I miss the simplicity of commercial generic carbonless "Avoid Verbal Orders" forms, which could be used to document pretty much anything, at least in simpler times. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

You need a lawyer. y Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

I started in high school, carrying a rod for a sutvey, doing the master layout, and contour plots, distributing the errors from the survey, and contributing a few details along the way, for a motel that has been in business for decades. I wasn't allowed as much autonomy until I had been out of...

Did you ignore what your molder said in response to your first RFQ? That's how you get bad parts. One way to get good parts: Kill your Supply Chain Manager. Develop a cooperative relationship with a small number of suppliers. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

Because yachts are often equipped with hugely expensive 'salons' right on top of the engine room, yacht yards are accustomed to, or at least able to accomplish, replacement of large items like propulsion engines and generators, working through holes in the hull side or the hull bottom, and...

Of course, I can provide a counter-example: We were buying a stainless casting from a domestic foundry, and having it machined by another outfit entirely. We could not find a domestic single source for the finished product, and these particular vendors could not seem to work together to produce...

I was peripherally involved with a bio-measurement system that used 'dry plumbing', where aqueous liquid was introduced at the start of a cycle and drained at the end. It worked great, for customers who kept it cycling 24/7/365. For customers who used it occasionally, it basically needed an...

You will continue to get whatever you accept. Cost of inspection should be included for offshore sources. That may change your onshore/offshore decisions, but that's a management problem, not an engineering problem. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

I agree with 3DDave; use a servo drive. I'll go farther; don't just plug in a servomotor and a ballscrew. Use a voice coil instead. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

Steppers are incredibly complicated, and never really behave like 'normal' motors. ISTR: Al Leenhouts sold steppers for a lifetime, and wrote a useful book or two to fund his retirement, good for 'practical' analysis. Some University of New Hampshire people wrote more theoretical stuff about...

Welding HDPE sheet does not sound reasonable to me. Some people build large chemical tanks that way, but the product is invariably extremely expensive, and I'd worry a lot about fatigue of bonded joints in dynamic situations, especially with sharp corners and edges. Look into rotational molding...

IOW, it will kill you. Make it a quad. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

The HP Z220 was designed for a corporate environment, where downtime just isn't tolerated. I've read the user manual once so far, and it's amazing. It can be, and obviously was, used with a PxE boot scheme. The refurbishers seemed pretty limited in understanding details like that, or setting...

I just bought a new-to-me HP Z220 with a 2TB hard drive and a 120ish GB SSD. It arrived with a BIOS option to use the SSD as a meta- cache for the HDD. Seems to work fine. It also arrived 'with' Win10Pro, but kept trying to do a PxE boot instead of booting from the hard drive as I expected...

OG: All the Radio Shacks near me, in two states at least, closed forever, several years ago. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

I used to work in a shop that made exhaust pipes for yachts. We shipped all over the world, and worked in metric or US units as necessary. Then one of our best fabricators got promoted to a designer. For way too long, he used 25 mm = 1 inch for his conversions. We discovered it when some...

Speaking of chemical resistance, polycarbonate basically has none. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA

On motorcycle gear levers and such, it used to be customary to add a radial slot and a pinch bolt to take up all the clearance in the splines. Mike Halloran Corinth, NY, USA