So I changed companies in 2018 from Raytheon to a small aerospace ducting company called RSA Engineered Products. The ability for advancement was more apparent at the smaller company and was directly discussed as part of the position. Since joining in August of 2018 the new position has required a lot of work on basic Engineering concepts. The most obvious and apparent problem the company had was severe lacking in testing cognizance (ability to predict and know that a test setup could do its intended function) to qualify their new products. A sample image is below. The program was something like 4 years late for qualification and management was eager to get the units under test into production. After this testing we tested the full ducts for sinusoidal vibration and random vibration at an external test house. Anyway, I’m gonna post a follow up right above this but the subject is totally different so, I guess that’s it.
This was my colleague measuring the moment arm from the pivot of the ball joint but more importantly the structural support for this ball joint and it’s sister setup had far too many problems for me to feel good. This was an endurance setup that used cartridge heaters to get up to ~900F. And…… We are using aluminum as our structural material. But worse than that, the fasteners to the table were 1/4in and the holes are 5/8in…. There wasn’t enough time to fully fix this and get it entirely reliable but at least I was able to line up the brackets so that the load on the base plate went almost directly into the table without much of a span. Ultimately we completed the testing but fixing this with real design elements with proper torque ratings, temperatures and structural configuration has been time consuming. (I’ve since added a DAQ, digital motor control, digital counter, and drawings and model files for digital representation)