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Which Engineering Schools Offer Adequate GD&T Courses?

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DeanD3W

DeanD3W

Mechanical
Feb 6, 2011
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It would be interesting to hear about which engineering programs, and separately identified, which engineering technology programs offer Junior/Senior/Graduate level GD&T courses.

I think GD&T Fundamentals, GD&T Applications, and Tolerance Analysis using GD&T would all be good course topics.

What have others found at their various schools, & what have your co-workers found at their schools?

Maybe we can get ASME's Design Education Committee, and maybe even ABET to listen..?

Regards,
Dean
 
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SAE does a just fine job of offering similar courses.... Universities for the most part don't even bother teaching the subject any more.

Cabbages, knickers, It hasn't got A BEAK!
 
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Peter - Thank you. There's one response.

sbozy25 - Thank you for the response. To work towards addressing the problem with new engineering graduates not having adequate GD&T training, I'm asking specifically about engineering colleges. I would like to ask for more information regarding your comment though... Do you think universities taught GD&T more in the past than they do now? If so, which schools are you speaking of.

ctopher - You say that no schools around you teach GD&T... That will help paint the picture if you could also ID the general area where you live. BTW - I'm well aware of the trainers in industry. The question posed is to learn more about which engineering schools are doing a good job with GD&T. The ones I'm aware of are RIT's MET program, and Oregon State University's ME program. I also believe UNC-Charlotte likely has a good course or two, since they have GD&T knowledgeable faculty there. El Camino College in California (where else, with that name) also likely does a good job, due to one faculty member there that I know of. Purdue and Ohio University are two others that are likely good, since they have also faculty members that are active with ASME Y14 standards (for which going to committee meetings are what I call going to "GD&T Camp"), but I'm hoping to hear what others have learned and heard about these and other colleges. Every college, except RIT, that I list above has faculty or at least adjunct faculty members involved with Y14 standards committees. Are other colleges doing a good job?

Maybe the answer will be pretty much none :-\ ?

Dean
 
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Necessary prerequisites for effective and useful GD&T training include:
processes - taught in engineering school maybe two years out of ten
material properties - nominally complete by end of year 2
drafting - not taught in engineering school today AFAIK
tolerancing - not taught in engineering school ever AFAIK

Your average engineering student is not going to get anything out of a GD&T course, because they've never mass produced anything or worked in a factory, so can't begin to appreciate why it's a good thing.

It might work in a co-op school or an MET school, after year 2.

If ABET picked it up, wouldn't that put some of you trainers out of business?


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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DeanD3W,

I took my GD&T course at Ryerson University in Toronto. It was in the evening. There were five students, including one day student.

The current web page lists MEC 222 Engineering Graphical Communication as follows...

Ryerson University said:
Introduction to technical drawing in compliance with Canadian and international standards: orthographic and auxiliary views, sections, dimensioning and tolerancing, assembly and detailed drawings. Dimensioning, standard notation symbols, drawings with off-the-shelf parts and parts lists will be covered. Labs will introduce both free-hand sketching and CAD-based methods.
Click to expand...

My quick search for the GD&T course yielded nothing. I wonder why.

Critter.gif
JHG
 
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MikeHalloran,
I'm coming out of over 10 years working with over 200 design engineers (between US and other countries) as their full time GD&T trainer and consultant... After all those years especially the best of the design engineers would still have me review most of their GD&T. They only deal with the details of GD&T once every year or so (6 months to 2 years, depending upon the type of product they were designing), so they get rusty enough that a full time dedicated GD&T person still serves a purpose. The group had a good background in the fundamentals, in a way that helped them design mating interfaces well to make GD&T and inspection a s simple as possible (usually :-\), but still when it came to the details they would come see me (this was an environment with lots of fairly complex & precise molded plastic parts, so maybe in a situation with simpler parts, they would have found less need for my help..?).

I think if all the engineering schools provided a good GD&T course as a design elective in the final year then it would only lead to more work for GD&T trainers and consultants. Maybe not so many fundamentals courses, but still courses to teach and probably more consulting work.

Dean
 
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What I've seen is slow and progressive push for applying standards at more companies. The more progress this push makes, the more obvious how inadequate GD&T experience really is throughout the industry. I really think that some managers believe that applying the international standards is as easy as just flipping a switch, while others have an irrational fear of the whole thing.

Matt Lorono, CSWP
Lorono's SolidWorks Resources & SolidWorks Legion
Follow me on Twitter
 
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Dean, I think it was more prevalently taught 15+ years ago. As others have stated, it is hard for students to grasp the concept as most have never produced a part.

I know Purdue and Rose Hulman used to have it as an integrated class. But to my knowledge that is gone. My former University, Tri-State University teaches it to the CAD majors because they need to know how to apply it. You might look into strong CAD schools? I got my training post degree from a local community college that had a CAD program. It was a night course for me.

I actually was just working with one of my interns today trying to explain to her how and when to apply GD&T. I ended up turning it into a full lesson when I realized she didn't even know what a datum is (she's a Kettering student currently). I used to be my in house company instructor.... I found that most under 30 graduates have no clue how to effectively use.

Cabbages, knickers, It hasn't got A BEAK!
 
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In my dealings with grads from several different nationally recognized universities, over a couple of decades, I have discovered that Engineering grads are great calculators and atrocious designers and absolutely incompetant drafters. Now that CAD has entered the arena, one of the drafting slots (usually of 2 available) has been shunted to Intro to ACad. GD&T?
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