SB Intake.
I wish all engineers had to apprentice as a mechanic. Maybe then we would not have designs that require extraordinary feats by mechanics to work on.... I would love to see engineers brought into the shop to work on some of this stuff.
I hear ya on that. I tried to look out for "us guys" who work on cars when I was designing stuff. Unfortunately there are some engineers who have never turned a wrench in their lives. Other times, they would not give us enough room to allow for service.
Or the guy who was supposed to "look out" for service came to me once just before the launch and asked for changes. We did not have time to accomodate his request and all the money allocated to the program was used up and we could not afford to change. It has to be done on a case by case basis.
Then there were a few cases where we were lucky enough just to design it so we could just put it together in the assembly plants, much less allow for easy service. When "we" work on our cars at home, we have all the time that we need to get the job done (theoretically). Where in a vehicle assembly plant, the operator (worker) has only 50 seconds to do their job before the next one is there in front of them. In the engine assembly plant we only had 22 seconds for each worker to do their job. It makes things a little more challenging.
I would try to accomodate the line worker that complained that they could not do their jobs. I would ask them to let me try it for a few jobs, so I could see first hand what they were dealing with. If I could do it myself in the proper time, then I would tell them that they should be able to do it. If I could not do the job in that time, then I would agree we needed to change something. I kept the mindset that if I could not do it myself, how could I expect someone else to. Let me tell you, once the workers got used to doing their jobs, they could do them much faster than I could when I was "just trying" to see if it was possible.
Not all of the design engineers spent time in the assembly plants to learn how that whole process worked. I enjoyed working on both sides of the fence in design and manufacturing so I could understand the whole process. I always kept my mechanic background in mind and tried to look out for the workers who put the parts on and the poor guy who had to fix this in service whenever possible.
Well, I better stop here, because I could go on for hours.
