mechanical engineighing – IOTW Report

mechanical engineighing

The youtube description says that this Chinese man has made a “robotic horse.”

No. It’s a mechanical pile of junk with a horse’s head stuck on it.

I find this video hard to watch, it’s like a frustration dream. The parts are working away spastically while the thing, noisily, goes about 1 mile a day.

This guy is saying that he hopes his invention will replace the plough horse. Uh, huh. And those little wheels you stole from a senior citizen’s walker will work great out on the dirt plains.

35 Comments on mechanical engineighing

  1. Wait until you see the Four Horses that Boston Dynamics has sold to GOOGLE. (relax, you won’t have much longer to wait)

    By the way, Tesla, how’s the battery car market down there?

  2. One of these days they will perfect the gasoline engine.
    IT’S NOT SURPRISING THAT GASOLINE ENGINES ARE GOOD. THEY’VE HAD WELL OVER A CENTURY OF CONSTANT REFINEMENT, UNDER HEAVY COMPETITIVE PRESSURES. The Car of the Future May Run on Gasoline: For all the talk of electric cars, the old-fashioned internal combustion engine is proving to be hard to beat.
    When most of us picture the high-tech personal mobility of the future, we tend to imagine a sleek, dead-quiet electric car, packed with voice- or motion-directed gizmos and self-driving features. We see ourselves gliding around almost effortlessly, free to talk, work or text as we see fit.

    What few of us conjure up is having this sort of experience in a gasoline-fueled car. But that may be changing in the face of recent design advances. The internal combustion engine—the workhorse of the industrial age—is proving to be much more than a stubborn technological incumbent.

    More than a century after becoming the dominant way that people move around, gas-powered cars are challenging ostensibly more advanced electric vehicles. It has proved hard to beat engines in which fuel is ignited, drives pistons and propels a vehicle. Even in 2040, according to forecasting agencies such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration, cars with gas- and diesel-powered engines will still represent some 95% of the international car market.

    A fully refined technology can be hard to beat.

  3. I’ve been in manufacturing for ever (I think) Foreign engineers suck. I’ve worked with anything from Russians, Indians, and Paki’s. They’re stupid and they work cheap. Just ask H.P. Indians and Paki’s are the worst.

  4. Oh man, Pulling that starter cord and hearing that distinctive 4 cycle small engine brings back years of memories from my childhood.

    3.5 hp Tecumseh engine on a small frame. Two wheels, a seat, handle bars with a throttle grip. Brakes optional. Mini-bikes made life pretty good for me back then. In all those years I only had to walk it home once when the cops caught me in my neighborhood.

    My friend that was riding with me took it worse than I did – he had to ride home with the cop and face his overly strict parents (my opinion) before I had to face mine, which was not an issue for me in the first place.

    That being said – That’s no way to build a Mini-bike.

    That’s a wasteful piece of crap, considering the time, materials and end product.

  5. Uncle Al. Germans are fine craftsman, Japanese will take an existing concept and improve and refine it. The advantage American Engineers have over everybody else is imagination. I wonder if all these damn video games are helping or hurting that.

  6. @bad_brad, uncle al

    The German and Japanese may be better because their culture drives their people to strive for perfection and to work hard. I have met a few foreign and native born engineers and I must say the newly minted ones are the least impressive. In fact, I think they are dangerous because they are so sure of themselves from the treatment of being special snowflakes and self esteem fluffery they are unable to listen to voices of experience. It saddens me to think we would not be able to again send a person to the moon or build the infrastructure to build an atomic bomb. Say what you want about the atom bombs, I am just pointing out the process to refine the material. We cannot even build a website for people to get insurance that the libtards deemed we need.

  7. Bad_brad

    I think the jury is still out with the video games. As far as imagination goes I think it is being stifled and suppressed in this era of politically correct bullcrap.

  8. daveinsocal , They’re not better. If you want find American Engineering and manufacturing at it’s best you need to look to the defense sector. They don’t hire cheap engineers from foreign lands and they do some amazing shit.

  9. Bad_brad

    I think the only reason you are not seeing foreign born engineers in defense right now is because of regulatory requirements. You are right they are doing some amazing studf in defense right now. But it is being mostly done by the mid and twilight career engineers.

    I have invested a lot of time and effort teaching newer engineers how to be engineers over the years.

  10. daveinsocal , I’ve met some sharp young MoFo’s at RMS outa Tucson. They drive cad like nobody else. That’s why I brought up the video games. After all Pro Engineer is like a big video game. It definitely gives these guys an advantage when it comes to modeling. I would imagine concept comes from some guy locked up in a rubber room watching war movies all day. But they were damn sharp mechanically also. That business sector has slowed too.
    One of these days when FUR ponies up on our bar tab I have some hilarious Paki engineer stories.

  11. Bad_brad

    Pro e is a good tool. I dont want to sound down on engineers. With any tool, the outcome is only as good as the person wielding the tool. I have seen and critiqued designs that were unproducible because of material choices or how the part was configured. Most engineers I have run across lately get upset because just because they have drawn it does not mean it can be made when I point that out. Things like a small radius a long way from an edge – looks good until you try to mill it and the cutter cant reach because the cutter don’t exist or you cannot hold finish and tolerance because of cutter deflection, chatter, and vibration, or the milling machine spindle crashes into the part. I should probably stop now lol.

    Thanks bad and everyone else allowing me to vent some

  12. Dave, you sound like a DFMA guy with a manufacturing back ground. I’ve owned a Job Shop for 30 years. I’m a programmer. Pro Man but primarily a Master Cam guy. I’ve run into those .125 rad 6. Deep. Not for awhile. I always tell them I can do most anything to a chunk of material as long as you got the money. My biggest bitch/problem with young guys is geometrical tolerancing. I had one the other day True position of Zero with a modifier on a plus .0003 minus nothing hole.

  13. Bad, I have been in a manufacturing or service environment for better than 30 years now that I think about it. I started in my early teens. Yes, I am a DFMA guy. And fault tree for process and in general problems, a root cause guy, PFMEA guy, etc. I run across people calling out 4140 HT that they want to weld… I then ask what post weld heat treat are they gonna do and they look at me like I broke wind… we had a rotating element recently and when I pointedly asked the designer if the outer diameter needed to be concentric to the bearing axis and the outer surface perpendicular to the bearing axis they were dumbfounded. I can ramble on. Thanks for listening Brad and everyone else.

  14. and I thought of my lawn mower.

    I think about my lawn mower when he comes to mow and I ask if the cutting level is set as high as I want it and check if there is any fungus he’s bringing to my lawn from the last lawn he cut.

    I guess I’m also thinking of him when I pay him, too. Other than that, it’s more likely I’m thinking of his hot sister.

  15. @daveinsocal:

    …we had a rotating element recently and when I pointedly asked the designer if the outer diameter needed to be concentric to the bearing axis…

    Did you mean the outer circumference needed to be concentric?

    I’m not trying to be a wise ass, just trying to understand. But maybe it is obvious I’m not trying to be a wise ass because my question reveals actually I’m a dumb shit. (-:

  16. Uncle al… no worries. Yes, you are correct – I meant circumference. Without getting into details of the part imagine a car wheel running off center, then imagine it not flat against the hub making it wobble.

    Uncle al, your humility and self depreciation belie what I think is a deep and profound wisdom gained from living and observations of others.

Comments are closed.