The Bite Too Big to Chew
This is the loading station of a machine that was one of the last jobs I did with my small machine building company. It is a precision hydraulic press for torque converters. During the years of 2005-2006 we had acquired …
Category: Trades
Jobs in the automation field
Systems Integration
For the last twenty years or so I have worked in the controls, machine building and systems integration fields, generally involved with automation on some level. I understand the controls and machine building part, they are pretty self-explanatory and descriptive …
Panelbuilding
This picture is from about 1999 when my small company was primarily a panel shop and controls integrator. At this time about half of our work came from NAS who built a lot of custom packaging equipment (they build mostly …
Hello from Tucson
As I travel on business I realized that it is more difficult to post when on the road. All of the familiar patterns are broken as I don’t have a ready plugged-in and booted up computer to sit down and …
How does my multimeter work?
Most people who work around electricity are familiar with multimeters. They have been around since the 1920s and used to only be available in analog form with a moving needle that pointed to several scales. Originally multimeters only measured current …
P&ID and Machine Design
The process industry has used P&ID (Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams) for many years as a method of describing the relationships between piping, instrumentation and system components. Usually this is applied to chemical, batching or fluid transfer projects and is nearly …
Ladder Logic 101: Where do I start?
*Note: This post was written in February of 2011. Since that time I have written a number of other posts on ladder logic you may find useful. These are listed below for your convenience: Ladder Logic 102: Organization (October 2012) …
A few thoughts on panelbuilding…
It seems like there is a constant battle between mechanical designers, electrical designers, maintenance technicians and engineers over just what a properly fabricated control panel should look like. If it were up to mechanical, the panel would be the size …
The Engineering and Project Notebook
Back when I was in engineering school one of the requirements for nearly every class was to keep an engineering notebook. Typically it consisted of a bound book with graph or engineering paper where we would keep a chronological record …
The Value of Education
In my previous life as owner of an automation and machine building company, part of my job was the hiring of employees. After placing an ad in the local paper I would usually receive 20 or more resumes for a …