Conversions...

Okay Folks,

This one is a little off-topic, but I wanted to share.

We received some plastic parts from our mold house on Friday. These were the first production run of parts off of our ISIS inMOTION mold tool. Check out details on inMOTION here.

My career as an engineer has ebbed and flowed since I joined the workforce. I spent a good number of years as a hard-core engineer, designing machines, processes, products and components. I have also spent a lot of time on the business side of the business, long separated from where I started. Since we broke off ISIS as its own entity, we all find ourselves wearing a lot of hats. In any given week, we're meeting with investors, courting customers, chasing the FedEx truck down the street with product and yelling at suppliers. As a team, we all have to be flexible, but we all have our own specific set of skills. Mine is mechanical design. All the enclosures, connector assemblies and housings are done by me.

There are very few things more exciting to me than seeing something become tangeable from a concept. I am probably of the last generation of mechanical engineers that started on the drafting table. At Purdue, we were requried to take one year of mechanical drafting with paper and pencil, then we transitioned to CAD during our sophomore year. Even when I started my internship, we were still maintaining designs on pen and paper. One of my favorite tools was the electric eraser, which they still make.

One of my early mentors told me that engineers had no business working on compters. They were for secretaries and draftsmen. An engineer's place was in the laboratory or on the machine floor. He said that he never forsaw the need for everyone to have a computer on their desk. He couldn't have been more wrong.

CAD has evolved in amazing ways even over my short career. The tools are powerful and intuitive. As with most things in my life, it is hard to imagine doing it without the computer. There is no way that I could create a compliated mechanical assembly drawing again with just a ruler, a compass and a pencil.

Anyway, I get a mixed bag of feelings when I open the first parts off of new mold tool. The most overwhelming is the anxiety that it will be completely messed up. Did I scale the model incorrectly? Did I leave out an important part? Are the tolerances screwed up? It is a victory to me to take a new part and mate the connectors to it or mount the PCB in the housing. Seeing things fit, connect properly and align make my day. They are good distractions to customers, investor meetings and paying the bills.

Yes, I probably should have spent much more time on the business Friday afternoon, but I had to play with my new toy. I assembled it dozens of times to make sure that it was right. The connectors mated and sealed. The covers aligned correctly. I took a sample home to show to Kari and the kids. It needed to be showed off. I felt victorious. Against who, I have no idea. Maybe it was a victory against myself. Or maybe it was victory against all things that plague engineers: managing all of the real world factors that make that perfect model on the computer screen imperfect.

To me, there is nothing more fulfilling than the sense of creating something.

Sorry again... General musings, far off topic. Please feel free to comment as appropriate.

Jay