What Did you do Today 2022

I have nearly finished putting the DRO scales on my mill, but fell at one of the last hurdles. I need a square to align the Y-scale to the machine: I have two engineers squares, one being too big, the other too small.

I have a Goldilocks-sized one on order to allow me to finish the job.

DrDave -

This may help.

On mine, I bolted an angle-plate to the table, suitably overhanging, then clamped a straight-edge to it.

This frees both hands for manipulating the scale and tools

Also, depending how your machine is arranged and the nature of the straight-edge, you might be able to use that to clamp the scale temporarily in place while tightening its fasteners.

I think I used variations of this for both the cross and vertical scales.

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 07/10/2022 11:58:05

Thanks, Nigel. I’ll give that a try, too, see how I get on.

Poured hundreds of gallons of water down a hole and watched disappear (and twice yesterday) - surprise it did as it was on top of a hill composed or 90% shale rocks from 3 inches below the surface.
All part of the drainage test required for the new Men's Shed planning application. What a colossal waste of time energy and resources. Hire digger, dig hole, pour in water, fill hole.
If the planning department were even half as clever as their astronomic fees imply they should have known the nature of the land from its position and being right next to a recent development hat had to do the same test.

Got my die filer completed, despite my silly errors and delighted with the smooth operation of the motion. I wish I could find a UK supplier of suitable files, though. Anyone interested in watching the wheel go round can do so here:

Die filer - the final episode

John

What the heck was a test like that even supposed to reveal not already known by local knowledge, anyway?

I think you are being a little unfair here. I suspect the Planning Officers are clever - but they are so restricted by Procedures and Processes and Protocols that they are not allowed to let any personal initiative or knowledge to interfere with the ISO9000000-ready box-ticking.

Think - every time some appalling crime or utter failure involving a statutory body takes place, there is the usual chorus from the Great Ignorant and the Professionally Thick, of

- "We Need Learn Lessons And Put Proper Procedures In Place, To Ensure It Never Happens Again! " [It does, albeit the details differ.]

Maybe that's why - maybe each new "procedure" acts against anybody doing what they meant to do, from doing it properly when the situation - be it a crime or an innocent workshop on a flood-less hill - presents something not on the drop-down menu..

Do "We" learn? Not if the Inquiry Report or the internal Managerial Review is published but then filed and forgotten! Not if some well-meaning but ill-thought new regulation or process is "rolled out" - that phrase a sure death-knell to efficiency and sense - despite it working only in its original situation.

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So perhaps it's not that your local planners are foolish. Perhaps they have no choice but to issue orders they probably know but must not admit, are foolish. So they end up looking foolish personally.

I'm sure there's a poem in there somewhere... 'An ode to a petty fuctionary' lol

I'm sure there's a poem in there somewhere... 'An ode to a petty fuctionary' lol

Discovered that during disconnecting, moving and re-connecting my Phase Convertor I have somehow shaken a connection loose.

It will now start and run, but only generates 182V on L2 & L3, and experiences a sudden irreversible voltage drop to 28-32V on those phases if I try to start a load greater than 2kW.

When the voltage drops that low it's spinning at maybe 30% of rated speed, creating a huge amount of slip and noise, whilst pushing the (apparent) current draw up to 28A!

I think I've narrowed it down to the L2 output connection shaking loose and/or one of the connections in the Balancing Capacitor switching circuit...

However rather than keep fiddling with it tonight, I did the obvious thing and went to Nottingham Goose Fair, where I've alternated between marveling at the engineering of the rides, trying to avoid being separated from too much cash, and having my innards gently re-arranged by the g-forces applied by some of the more exciting attractions.

Edited By Jelly on 08/10/2022 01:22:30

There is some personal experience behind that, leading to my defending the planners' strange order to bury a lot of water, as possibly a directive from On High they were in no position to question however barmy.

I worked years ago for a small, local contract electronic engineering company that as it handled a lot of MoD work went for, or was "persuaded to" go for, DEF-STAN-0524.

This is or was a product-guarantee scheme based on traceability of parts and materials back to their manufacturers, creating great long paper-trails, but it worked. We see a small example in model-engineering with the requirement to have our club boiler-test gauges periodically, traceably calibrated

It was though quite an upheaval, and A Man From The Ministry basically worked with us for several months, helping the managers set up the necessary systems and a few other more local requirements. It worked, too. And without a computer in sight! (Maybe that's why it worked, and efficiently, too. ) The company gained the certification and more MoD orders.

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Roll on the years and I was working for a Major National Organisation that had been part of the Scientific Civil Service but sold off by Blair & Brown for a cappuchino or two. Its primary customer, still a Govt. Body, now insisted we have ISO9001 - for no clear reason other than being Very Fashionable at the time, because our work had not changed.

This time the Directors went into a tizz and a panic, and instead of sitting down calmly with another Man From The Ministry to learn what was necessary, appeared to have bought an American business-college text-book written by a Doctor in Bureaucracy-ology. This buried any Good Intentions under a cascade of the most inane, patronising twaddle you can imagine.

We all attended day-courses to give us a flavour of what ISO900x is meant to be, and learnt it was created from the UK's DEF-STAN and other European countries' equivalents, to satisfy American governmental and Pentagon policy to refuse any QA scheme not invented in the USA.

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It was soon clear that unlike DEF-STAN, ISO900x is not a QA or product-guarantee scheme at all! It encourages companies to establish such schemes but is primarily a heirarchical management-control plan that effectively suppress its "Evil Eyes" - Initiative, Individuality, Inventiveness, Intelligence, Ingenuity... basically any positive characteristic beginning with "I" but not associated with bitten fruit.

We had to Put 'Procedures' ['Work Instructions' or 'Guides' - they differed in some way] In Place..... . documents set to a company-made template whose first 10 or so pages of rhubarb included some "Left intentionally blank" for no known purpose. The bit that mattered - the instructions for the described process - was relegated to an Appendix, labelled as "Appendix" !

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I used one I wrote as internal-auditor bait. These characters, about four of them, would stalk the place, clipboards drawn as in Spaghetti Western meets Kafka. I had hung the 'Work Instructions' for a particular piece of test-equipment, prominently from it; in the eye-line of the posse on entering the room. They would examine its title, verify it belonged to the equipment cited, and that the vast Master Copy file-name on the cover matched their list, note the odd calibration label here and there, and depart happy. The poor dears had no idea that the 'Appendix' was useless. For just as I had finished writing it my manager rebuilt the plant, making it work in a different way, with new software on its controlling PC - too late for a new set of instructions to be written. The internal auditors never asked if the instructions were correct and up-to-date, only that the document itself existed!

When the certifying auditors arrived they took one look and told the management they had gone far beyond what was needed, and could throw away great swathes of the stuff!

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"Left intentionally blank"....

A friend elsewhere delights in puncturing the puffery. telling me having once asked in some important [?} meeting "what are 'synergies'?" ; and on its user hazarding a guess that it simply means "co-operation", demanded to know why not just say "co-operation" , and anyway how can "synergy" be plural?

On blank pages though, she recounted having bemused a senior manager by pointing out a page bearing the words, "This page left intentionally blank" , is not blank at all.

If you have a good QA procedure in place, and the design office draws up a lead life jacket, you can be sure that it will be made from exactly the right grade of lead. To be more serious, all you need to do is document what should be good working practice anyway. Where it all goes wrong is when you appoint a 'QA engineer', who sees it as his role to write more and more procedures to justify his existence. Where I worked we once had a bonus target to write more procedures. At one point we had different departments with different procedures for doing the same job. All very good, as it was more paperwork. Being an iconoclast, I suggested the bonus target should be getting rid of procedures down to a bare minimum to keep the certification. If you don't have a procedure it can't be audited, and so you can't fail the audit. No wonder they gave me early retirement. If you want to get into a right tail chasing argument, try and work out who is 'Suitably Qualified and Experienced' to do various tasks, and who is SQEP to say they are. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? as Juvenal would have it. Ask Boris, he's a classical scholar

One point made in the introductory course was to beware the myth that your quality of what you sell but can be low but if consistent, you can still gain ISO accreditation.

That is theoretically true, but would of course be commercially self-defeating.

What did occur though was a flurry for a few years of smaller companies with private rather than trade customers, like garages, proclaiming doing this, that or the other "to ISO9001" . They could not of course, because the accreditation covers how the firm is run, not the specifics of its product or service.

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Ironically, when we were (in hindsight) being fattened up for sale, as an arms-length but still State-owned organisation, our directors latched onto yet another of those daft fads from US business theoreticians or Japanese car factories.

Called "TQP" , it was announced with flourish of glossy leaflets of "Pseuds' Corner" level, and an internally-made publicity video so cringingly patronising and embarrassing it ought be a media-study course example of what not to do. It starred senior staff members telling us how good it all is, without saying what it is, but they looked very uncomfortable about their apparently reading all this media-ology twaddle from a screen slightly too far off-camera. against a distracting background of work-related action.

Needless to say this material explained nothing, such as how we might actually meet TQP's central tenet of all of us having more control and initiative over own own work. After all, we all agreed, irrespective of role and grade, we could only do as we were told, in the way we were told because it was the way that worked!

Nothing came of it, TQP sank without trace, and a year later in came ISO9001 whose central tenet is that of rigid top-down management and formally-composed procedures.

What did TQP stand for? No idea - it sounds like something you'd rub into a bruise but was probably Total Quality something. I called it Totally Questionable Principles.

I was as it were brought up on Def Stan 0521 which then became ISO9000. If you think that was onerous you should try the extras required for satellite flight hardware - of course you do rather need to be sure it is going to work before you launch it, no backsies there.

Today I took some genuine crap from the Men's Shed to the 'we are a recycling centre not a waste depot'. So sad to see the metal bin full of perfectly good iron gates, wheelbarrows etc, and saw an unblemished cash box in the general skip complete with key but not allowed to recover it.

I was one of several thousand 'synergies' that GE claimed as a reason for their takeover of Alstom Power (Ex ABB-Alstom Power, Ex Alstom Power, Ex GEC-Alstom, Ex GEC Turbine Generators, Ex EE AEI, etc.).

At least I got my redundancy pay for being synergistic...

Anyone remember bullsh*t bingo. Cards with a selection of the latest management buzzwords and during the monthly briefing we'd tick them off. If you filled the card you noted the time, first one wins. Had to be assessed after the meeting of course, no-one had the nerve to shout bingo whilst the big cheese was wittering. I had to do weekly briefings for my team, but I always tried to use real English words as nature intended. English has a very large vocabulary, it isn't often you have to invent new words or use existing ones to have new meanings

A while ago I was Quality Manager in a small engineering works which manufactured and supplied pumps to other companies within our group which was part of a large international supplier of bespoke food processing plants, we also supplied external customers in the food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. It was decided that we should gain ISO 9000 certification and an external advisor was appointed, this was to satisfy those in charge of the international side of our business, they could put the ISO logo on their company notepaper that was all they were interested in. Within our plant there was a problem that the shop floor did not trust the management and vice versa, to the extent that the shop floor had manufacturing drawings from years ago which they had altered to their own ideas of how the product should be made, there was no way that they would relinquish these drawings so effectively the design department really had no idea what dimensions the parts were being made to. I was caught in the crossfire and there were many other quality issues that needed to be addressed, the quest for ISO certification brought everything to a head and I came under tremendous stress and also being expected to mislead the customers as to the state of quality within the company. Unfortunately the stress that I was under triggered PTSD delayed from unpleasant things that had happened when I was in the Air Force, I had a major breakdown and some 13 months later the parent company of our group decided to retire me on I’ll health grounds, suffice to say that our works never achieved any certifications and a few years later was closed for good. Some companies don’t stand a cat in hells chance of gaining certifications because of the attitudes and practices that prevail. Dave W

I have spent my afternoon messing about with the RPC to try to cajole it back into life.

As things stand with the loose connections reinstated, it now produces two balanced phases of 430V, and the true phase is at 248V.

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I am utterly mystified, and concerned that this means there's damage to the powered winding, resulting in the whole thing acting as a step-up transformer.

The other possibility is that the L2 and L3 voltmeters are now some-how now measuring the line to line voltage of L2-L3 and L3-L2 rather than the Line to Neutral voltage...

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I will have to make up a test lead to allow me to safely put a multimeter across the output to determine which is the case.

I can however feel myself rapidly approaching the point where I could happily scrap the bloody thing (there's a lot of copper in an 11kW motor) and buy a smaller commercial one (from the likes of Transwave) and be done with it.

Edited By Jelly on 08/10/2022 20:41:24

My sympathies Dave, it's extremely difficult to get people to put effort into improvement programmes. All too often folk miss the point that the organisation they work for is in the Last Chance Saloon. The organisation has to improve or die, but only the Board who understand the accounts know the awful truth.

A common human failing to be entirely satisfied with our own performance, completely convinced that it's impossible to do better. This manifests as managers who treat ISO9001 as a box ticking paper exercise and staff who refuse to cooperate, dismissing the whole effort as pointless.

People don't understand the why or the how, and a few years later are amazed when the company goes bust or outsources . Naturally the collapse is nothing to do with them, must be someone else's fault!

Organisations in trouble generally produce quality product, but productivity is low because they don't improve. Uncompetitive organisations eventually fail, or shut down and restart in a new location with a new workforce who don't have historic bad habits.

The essence of improvement is to have a good hard think about processes. There's no point in simply writing down what was done in the past or padding the document with rubbish. Processes have to be reviewed looking enthusiastically for improvements, not only individually but as they relate to each other. Difficult work and best done by those who do the job - if they can be motivated!

Dave

Dave

Your comments above are very relevant to the situation that I found myself in, the problem with drawings that I referred to came to a head when it was decided to outsource the shafts that the pumps were built around, the design dept. issued a set of drawings to the sub contractor but unfortunately when their product came in house it wouldn’t fit the pumps because production had modified some of the critical dimensions on the shafts and the components that fitted on the shafts and they were working to their own altered drawings which the design dept knew nothing about. Their was arrogance in production and design and matters got very unpleasant between them and quality was caught in the crossfire, this debacle was only part of long-standing issues in the company, it was plain to see that the internal problems within the company meant a quality certification was just pie in the sky. Dave W

I just fixed my satellite box. The cables appeared to be at fault. I'd remount the plugs on the wires and it would show 2 good connections, loud and clear, until I tried to watch something then splatt, one or both would fail.

I thought I have seen this before.

I opened up the box, resoldered the other side of the plug to the pcb, put it all back together and now it works.

It was that ghastly, lead-free Euro-solder which needed to be replaced with some good, British, 60/40