Archive for the ‘Paper’ Category
The Engineering Plotter
With a computer and particularly with CAD programs, it is possible to make engineering drawings and plans of virtually any size. You can zoom in to see the tiny details and zoom out to see the big picture both literally and figuratively. Most of the actual physical work in building a new prototype, however, doesn’t happen in front of a computer screen. The people who need the information contained in that drawing in order to turn it into reality, need something a little more portable. Today, as in days past, that means an actual paper drawing.
Today, those drawings are created with the computer and then printed out on a special oversized printer called a plotter. The plotter recreates the entire drawing on extra large plotter paper using a scale that makes it easy for the fabricators or technicians to see all the fine detail of the engineering drawing. The plotter can reproduce any kind of engineering drawing required to turn the concept into reality.
These usually include an exploded view drawing showing all the various components of the device as they will be put together in the finished device, an assembly drawing showing the components assembled together in the final form, materials lists, component drawings showing each piece of the device by itself, finish schedules that detail the surface treatments of the assembly, packaging drawings, and even marketing artwork for the carton manufacturer. Of course, there may be many more as well, including schematic drawings if the thing being drawn has electrical circuits.
These drawings are often printed out on the plotter paper and then packaged up as complete sets for those who need to see the whole picture, such as checkers, safety engineers, and others whose responsibility includes every aspect of the product. Others may have more limited needs and will receive a subset of the entire engineering drawing package. Those with limited need for drawings might include the circuit board layout designer, the packaging engineer, printers, and graphic artists.
Because of the wide variety of people who use these drawings and the number of projects that may be in development at a particular company, the engineering plotter is often in high demand as the only device capable of reproducing the fine detail of a complex new design in a size that allows it to be seen clearly without the use of a magnifying glass. Often these drawings are needed for a very specific time either for a group meeting or to coincide with the availability of a particular fabrication machine. It may take a considerable amount of time to print a single drawing due to the complexity and size of each image. Plotter time is often scheduled in advance to be sure that drawings can be completed to meet the time requirement.
Since the engineering plotter is often remotely located to those who send their drawing files to be printed, it is incumbent upon each user to make sure there is plotter paper left in the machine for the next printing job.
A New Stimulus Plan to Put Americans Back to Work
Sometimes we worry over the wrong things in this country. For example, one of the main reasons why many Americans want stronger border patrols to keep out illegal aliens is that they believe these illegals will take jobs away from American citizens. They think that these aliens will work for less money and no benefits, and that some businesses will hire them for that reason even though that means the business is committing a crime. That’s probably true. Some businesses will hire them instead of Americans and some Americans will not have jobs because of it. It is however, a minor problem, in the grand scheme of things. The people who are really responsible for eliminating jobs for American citizens are American engineers and scientists.
Think about it. When we were kids growing up in the seventies, there were a few jobs you could always count on for the summer, or even on a permanent basis if you needed work. You could work as a cashier at the grocery store, or you could pump gas. There are roughly a quarter million gas stations in the United States, that should be employing Americans as attendants pumping gas and cleaning windshields. Instead, that job has been virtually eliminated and literally millions of American workers have been displaced, by a gas pump that reads credit cards and prints out a receipt on a little slip of thermal paper.
The scientists who invented these little thermal printers with their little thermal paper rolls, and the software engineers who programmed the machines to read a credit card and transmit the data automatically to the credit card company for approval, and then start the gas pump once the approval is received, are the real villains here. In fact, if we rounded up the scientists and engineers in this country and shipped them off to Mexico in exchange for laborers, we’d probably be better off. At least we’d have gas to pump.
We’d have groceries to ring up and bag, too. There are too many grocery stores switching over to self-check out aisles that don’t need any hired help to ring up a customer’s groceries. Well, I’ll tell you something. If I’m going to be ringing up and bagging my own groceries, I want a discount on the total bill equal to at least minimum wage for the time I spend doing it. Instead of worrying about building border fences, if we all stopped using self check out aisles, we could create at least four or five new jobs in nearly every supermarket across this country.
Let’s send these automated machines back where they came from, which was probably Mexico or China. The more we rely on these automated machines, the more jobs we create in other countries, and the more we take away from America. Come on folks, let’s get America bagging groceries and pumping gas again!