Why do people think manufacturing is for dummys?

December 1st, 2009

We hear a lot about how our country has shifted to a knowledge-based economy where manual, tactile skills are less important. This is based on an idiot’s dichotomy between intelligence and manual work. Because manufacturing inherently hints of manual work, it is never waved about as a career aspiration for our young folks who have evolved beyond manual labor.

But the process of turning material into a useful product is not too easy for a college-educated high-flyer; it is too hard. You are accountable to reality when you are working with physicality.

I got the below sentence in an e-mail today from the guy who runs our heat treat. I don’t think he has a college degree. He is not one of The Engineers. He is just the guy who constantly bails us out when we have a material integrity problem.

“I understand the attached report shows hardness’s of RC 46/47 when checked on the Knoop and converted to the Rockwell scale.”

Note his grammatical errors such as the incorrect possessive apostrophe on the word hardness. Like I said, he is not part of the intellgentsia. However, the point of his e-mail was that by converting from one measurement scale to another, we were getting an inaccurate result. Another dumb desk-jockey mistake. (Remember any stories of metric to English unit conversion?)

Also today: Did you know that by taking a casting and milling off somewhere around a quarter of an inch you will expose porosity within the casting? Did you know that if you are an engineer and you have to make a cast part lighter and you instruct the factory to mill the casting (rather than authorizing a new casting which you would have to pay for from your budget), the cost of poor quality because of the exposed porosity is now a manufacturing problem rather than an engineering problem? Did you know that the correct solution of redesigning the casting mold for a thinner part may not be possible because you might not have a realistic allowance for movement of the mold core without breaking through your thinness completely?

Of course you knew. You’re too smart to work in a factory.