Monday 30 April 2012

The engineer in me bursts forth

So in real life I am an engineer, which suits me down to the ground as I can still earn a reasonable living while adhering to minimum dress code. In practice this means as long as my genitalia are not visible things are considered mostly satisfactory. I have been an engineer since the age of 4, and my Mother can probably pinpoint the very hour it happened because that is when I was given my first lego set. Within minutes I had constructed a reasonable facsimile of a car and was performing rudimentary stress analysis against doorframes and walls. Like most of my hobbies, it just snowballed from there.

Now one of the benefits of being an engineer is you get some pretty sweet tools, and one of the most useful for the sort of thing I do is 3D CAD modelling. This allows me to generate pretty things like this;



In fact I have modelled pretty accurately* all of the lugs and tubes that have arrived. This is fab all in all, as it takes a significant amount of guesswork out of the design process, plus lets me know if any of the parts I bought from Ceeway are not suitable. As it turned out my seat tube is marginally too short for the geometry I want, but not enough to cause serious issues.

Real framebuilders will scoff and snort and say 'damnable newfangled nonsense, when I were a boy we had nowt but sticks and the grime from our own foreheads to create our geometrics sonny boy!' Well yes, but if it means that I am one step closer to making a frame that is actually useful, having put so much time and energy into it, then so be it...

* See post #1, the engineers cry; 'Close enough is good enough'


2 comments:

  1. I wonder who you are referring to when you say "real frame builders" ;)

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  2. No one in particular, though in hindsight I see where you might get that idea from...

    ReplyDelete