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UCS Hellmaker posted:I need to sit down and edit it out but I worked for a sub contractor for GE power and by god you guys really have no idea how bad it was when the CEO fight happened in 17 and it came out that the head of the power division had ordered billions worth of blades to be made in order to build this idea that ge power was in great shape so he could take over as CEO. Whole companies basically went tits up overnight because suddenly entire product lines were just gone, massively overproduced and they had literal years worth of blades collecting dust in the warehouse. The ge was going full tilt into 3d metal printing, spent billions buying machines to make small blades that weren't yet tested or had regulatory approval. I don't think they have yet gotten the 3d printing tech where they need it to match the casting quality. Mind you most blades are exotic alloys like iconel, which isn't something that they can deviate from easily. This really doesn't surprise me. The entire time I was with Alstom their entire thing was inflating every number possible in order to make the manager look better. The fact that carried over to when GE had them doesn't surprise me. I swear like half of the things we were told to do were meant for press releases and stock pumping. We secured an agreement to provide spares for a plant in Saudi Arabia and then sat on it for a year so we could carry a single million dollar payment "due" from the customer for the end of the fiscal year report. They were going to claim the actual payment once everything was shipped again the next year but instead handed the project over to someone who didn't know how to order parts in SAP and so she kept making excuses until it was too late to meet deadlines. That was fun. If anyone claims they're going to start doing additive manufacturing on production metal parts to replace castings just loving run. The fact of the matter is that the technology has grown by leaps and bounds in a relatively short amount of time and some of the stuff companies are doing with it is really cool and for some applications it's amazing and may shift how we approach making things, especially designing and making replacement parts for things that aren't easy to find or make anymore for various reasons. That said, I've worked for two companies with dedicated Additive departments and there's a wide gap between the "I 3D printed a mirror holder for my 1962 Chevy" and other stuff you see online from hobbyists and full implementation in industrial environments. My wife spent the last two years trying to sell a part made with additive techniques to a customer who wanted something like that and it was supposed to be the flagship part from that division. What we've found is that the ASTM/SAE and MIL-DTL standards around metal parts are accepted and recognized by just about everyone; we all know what they mean and how they work. There's testing of both the raw material and final product that can be verified and tracked from cradle to grave. Additive standards are still being developed and techniques standardized. We're still trying to reliably produce single crystal additive alloys with the same defect rate as a casting. Do you powder-laser (sinter) manufacture a turbine blade horizontally or vertically? How does each effect the heat expansion direction vs. a single crystal casting? The part my wife was working on represented a weight reduction, cut down on outside processes and LRUs and wasn't under much stress at all; it was almost just a passive part. The customer still had to say no because they don't have the data needed to approve the production use of something fairly simple with some big benefits. Like a lot of places, we're finding a good set of use cases for 3D printing with tooling and cores for castings. I have at least one supplier now who is selling themselves with the idea they can do more complex operations than some more advanced shops because of this, or that they can easily replicate dies and such for extremely out of date (60+ year old) designs. This is a pretty far cry from when I worked at Alstom and they liked to do 3D printed plastic layouts for proposals that you could manipulate and make move. We've gone from dioramas to helping make production parts, but anyone who thinks they're getting an additive part in a functional area of a high end machine is at least five years ahead of themselves if not more. the number of drawings that would need to be updated and revised alone for parts already in production is crazy.
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Jul 18, 2022 20:26
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Tarkus posted:They prefer the term private dick. Ah, the old private-dick game. I’m more public and less private about the dick game these days, but because I’m bored out of my gourd, let’s hear the case.
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Jul 18, 2022 20:41
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Crazyweasel posted:I’ve worked almost exclusively at large companies and I love the loving whining about suppliers having us “over the barrel”. First of all we were the ones to sole source the material and refuse to invest in finding a second source. Secondly our profits are orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than these companies that live or die by single customers/PO’s and being paid on time. I’m not saying they don’t get their cut, but it’s all just endless bitching from Procurement and Program Manager people that don’t understand what the gently caress their job is and senior leadership whose job is literally (as you said) just make quarterly numbers look good. I've been about 10 years at a huge multinational that always always always required a Mech-E doctorate for senior management that let one finance guy slip through into the C-suite a few years ago and the rot has been fast and heavy
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Jul 18, 2022 20:50
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Radio Shack, in Canada, changed over to The Source years ago and those stores are just overpriced cell phone accessories. One store even sold a Galaxy S10 to my 90-year-old-father in law when he went to get a new flip phone. Back in the day, RS was fantastic. Me and a buddy where big AV nerds in high school and started up our own DJ business using cheap rear end Realistic brand equipment from Radio Shack. A few mixers, some lovely mics, and cables. We bought audio cassette singles (cost $1 each) and connected walkmans and a dual tape deck in to the board so we could fade in and out of songs. We even build a small FM transmitter using stuff we bought from Radio Shack. In the early-mid 90s I remember it being the go-to place for common computer parts or adapters, cross over cables, etc. Then they started to employee sales people who only knew pagers and phones and nothing else.
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Jul 18, 2022 22:21
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the regional manager of my local Radio Shack during the last bad years was named something like Dragyn Bloodovitch? Vladimir Dragonov? I only know this bc his name was prominently displayed at the register. I wish I could remember the actual name... it sounded like the villain of a Thundercats knockoff or like one of those late-80s-era COBRA villains.
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Jul 18, 2022 22:33
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Engineering firms remain good when engineers are getting promoted into management and get to the top. They get bad real quick when salespeople, "buisness development experts" and accountants get promoted. Suddenly rather than caring about making good products you're caring about making maximum profits at the expense of everything else. Honestly the Boeing farce is a prime example - it used to be extremely engineer heavy at the top but when it merged with mcdonnel-Douglas part of the agreement put all the failson financial """wizards""" into top management who then had great ideas like "what if we make our new plane intentionally unsafe and then get customers to pay for the DLC that makes it so the plane doesn't randomly nosedive into the ground??? We'd make lots of money doing that!!!" Despite all the engineering people saying "this is a real bad idea don't do it" Ans the loving 40 years of experience test pilot saying that the plane is actively dangerous to fly. Also 3d printings to replace castings was an idea Ingersoll Rand wasted Money chasing. The i2v engineers refused to accept the assurances from the entire engineering department that selective laser sintering crankshafts was not a good idea and resulted in the test one leaking uncontrollably (since it's porus and has high pressure oil feeds in it to lubricate the journal bearings) followed by it lasting 2 whole cycles before snapping on one of the crank pins Ans scrapping the whole machine. The worst part? It wasn't even cheaper. In truth the only 3d printing you can do in casting is for lost PLC processes which is a much better way of doing small batch castings than lost wax.
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Jul 18, 2022 23:19
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yep. finding out GE was betting a major part of the farm to 3d printing using sintering was  because any real look at the requirements of the parts and how porous the stuff was on completion said everything. Let alone that in high heat conditions it would lead to microvoids against the blades which likely would have led to early failures that would launch small bits of the metal all along the turbine.
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Jul 18, 2022 23:39
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Drone_Fragger posted:Engineering firms remain good when engineers are getting promoted into management and get to the top. The boing stuff is absolutely insane, but to be ‘fair’ to the ceo I don’t think the idea was born out of selling safety as DLC. Rather, they wanted their new fancy engines stapled onto too small of a craft, that way pilots didn’t have to retrain because technically it was something they were already certified to fly! This made selling them much easier. But along the way they realized it was a Frankenstein and required additional safety measures, and then they realize DLC would be a fun way to nickel and dime their customers. I could be wrong on that, but either way someone at the top deserves to hang for the deaths that occurred due to the MAX.
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Jul 19, 2022 00:03
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I almost can't believe you...they were going to 3d print metal generator turbine blades? Like for power plants? Not fiberglass wind turbine blades? What the gently caress
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Jul 19, 2022 00:13
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Drone_Fragger posted:Engineering firms remain good when engineers are getting promoted into management and get to the top. This recently happened at a company I worked at. Medium size software development copy in the middle of nowhere, USA. Pay was under industry average, but we had a 35 hour work week, good benefits, a generally happy company culture, and satisfied customers. Everyone in management was promoted from the ground up, not a single person on our board of VPs didn't at least do some form of programming in their day. It was the sort of place where you'd get hired right out of college and work there your entire life if you didn't mind a mundane industry. We eventually started hiring into management from the outside and the decline was noticable right away. It started with condescending emails about how we're salaried at 35 but 'expected' to work 50 minimum. We started getting projects that fundamentally made no sense fast tracked so some failson could put their name on something, even after senior engineers pointed out the product might not even be legally viable, much less understandable to the customers. Customers were starting to get pissed that their accounts were constantly hosed up because of sloppy rushed development. It finally culminated in a reorganization that haphazardly split up teams that had worked together for over a decade in some braindead effort to "crosstrain" everyone (ie. expect one person to do the job of five) and it was clear not a single person with technical acumen actually had a say in how things were reorganized. Morale took a huge flaming dump, one dude just flat out had heart attack from it all. I suspect the people that came in worked out that they had the entire software development team by the nuts because we worked in a proprietary framework/language and weren't exactly located in a place where there was high demand for devs so where the gently caress were any of us going to leave for? They'd just work us so hard that we wouldn't have the time or energy to learn industry standard skills so we'd be turbo hosed. Then the pandemic happened, people had free time to study industry skills, and there was a sudden boom in remote developer jobs. So many people who understood how stuff actually worked got the hell out, and as far as I can tell the entire reorganization was rolled back and all of the geniuses behind it were finally told to get out. A total of three or four VPs who were clueless to the company culture or software development practices managed to eject decades of institutional knowledge out the door without actually accomplishing a single thing in under two years. As far as I know the department never really recovered and there's still people who have worked there for 10-20 years submitting their resignations. I'm guessing it will limp around for a while as the sort of place college grads go to to get something on their resume but I have no idea how they're going to accomplish anything in a timely manner after both pissing away so much expertise and leaving tons of maintenance nightmares in their wake
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Jul 19, 2022 00:24
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Car Hater posted:I almost can't believe you...they were going to 3d print metal generator turbine blades? Like for power plants? Not fiberglass wind turbine blades? I think you missed some keywords like "Boeing" and "plane".
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Jul 19, 2022 00:41
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Kirk Vikernes posted:I think you missed some keywords like "Boeing" and "plane". I hope. Surely it wasn’t parts for whatever the modern equivalent of a cfm56 is.
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Jul 19, 2022 00:47
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:No that was about GE and land-based (electrical power generating) turbines. I must have been skimming the wrong post. I don't read good.
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Jul 19, 2022 00:52
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Lazyfire posted:Additive standards are still being developed and techniques standardized. We're still trying to reliably produce single crystal additive alloys with the same defect rate as a casting. Do you powder-laser (sinter) manufacture a turbine blade horizontally or vertically? How does each effect the heat expansion direction vs. a single crystal casting? The part my wife was working on represented a weight reduction, cut down on outside processes and LRUs and wasn't under much stress at all; it was almost just a passive part. The customer still had to say no because they don't have the data needed to approve the production use of something fairly simple with some big benefits. A single crystal additive process would basically be the holy grail of high end metal 3d printing processes. The laser sintering porosity and density issues are what's holding back basically the whole industry, yeah?
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Jul 19, 2022 00:52
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UCS Hellmaker posted:Oh trust me. There was more then just ge issues that did the damage. The facility in Virginia was primarily working with Honeywell and there was a massive incident that ended up with honeywell literally putting an oversight man there because it turned out they had literally rented storage facilities they shoved tons of hosed up parts in and never informed head office or the client. All of which was uh, not ok in the slightest. I'm reminded of the bit in A Confederacy of Dunces where Ignatius is forced to get a job, and he 'works' at an office just by throwing away all the paperwork he's given, and his boss doesn't realise until he's long gone.
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Jul 19, 2022 08:57
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:A single crystal additive process would basically be the holy grail of high end metal 3d printing processes. The laser sintering porosity and density issues are what's holding back basically the whole industry, yeah? Reliable single crystal is what everyone has been chasing for the last ten years, and some of the studies have suggested it is possible to make something that looks right but the parts tend to fail when normal testing standards are applied. So far as I know there isn't anything in a high temperature or pressure environment made with additive techniques alone that used to/would normally be cast. I know some additive parts are flying or being installed in the next few years, but we're talking surfaces, supports and air management stuff, not bearing houses or turbine parts. At this point additive is what Bitcoin was five years ago: all the most annoying people you know never shut up about it's potential, but the actual applications are limited and there's no clear path to the future they talk about.
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Jul 19, 2022 09:30
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The most interesting high-spec additive parts I have personally heard about are ones with inherently complex geometry that you couldn't cast or layup in the first place. Firearms suppressors are what come to mind - it is expensive, and I don't know how reliable they are yet, but prior to additive they'd need to be assembled from many machined parts, which is annoying and limits geometry.
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Jul 19, 2022 10:07
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Drone_Fragger posted:Engineering firms remain good when engineers are getting promoted into management and get to the top. That isn't always true. My first employer was an engineering company (AV industry) and dealing with the VPs/upper managers who were also engineers was sometimes like dealing with extraterrestrials. Not only that, they would make products on a hunch with no market studies prior to pouring money into expensive, overengineered white elephants that no one wanted to buy. An additional issue was a lof of them had a God complex and would constantly meddle with the work of sales and marketing, resulting in mountains of spec sheets and walls of text full of clunky, badly-written sentences that included no compelling arguments for prospective customers why they should buy the product.
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Jul 19, 2022 17:26
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Drone_Fragger posted:Engineering firms remain good when engineers are getting promoted into management and get to the top. As a foundry professional this thread has me all hot and bothered. Seriously though maybe, maaaaybe, you could over come internal voids by 3D printing metal powder and then oven sintering. Not for a turbine blade, but wait sintering changes the part geometry in very hard to predict ways so lol at getting it right on the first or 2nd try. Also if someone tells you they have a way to predict shrink rates in 3D for complex geometry with a straight face.Also single crystal castings made from powderized material? 
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Jul 19, 2022 17:51
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Nuts and Gum posted:The boing stuff is absolutely insane, but to be ‘fair’ to the ceo I don’t think the idea was born out of selling safety as DLC. Rather, they wanted their new fancy engines stapled onto too small of a craft, that way pilots didn’t have to retrain because technically it was something they were already certified to fly! This made selling them much easier. But along the way they realized it was a Frankenstein and required additional safety measures, and then they realize DLC would be a fun way to nickel and dime their customers. Boeing found itself at a fork in the road, having to either turn one way that would make them give up the competitive advantage of their 737 lock-in, or turn the other way and not use the new fuel-efficient engines all of their customers were demanding. They then decided to say "gently caress it" and instead drive straight forward into median (just as their planes would start falling straight into the ground).
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Jul 19, 2022 18:27
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^^^^The Boeing saga gets dumber when you hear that they spent the years before the 737 Max crashes telling their suppliers to prepare to offer bids on a new mid-market design that was set to sit between the 737 and 787. Then the Max crashes happened and basically everything at Boeing went to fixing that. It slowed down development of the 777x (because it's another update of an old design) and the 787 line basically shut down and was recently moved out of Washington state and went from like rate 10 to rate 1 for most of the pandemic (and isn't expected to deliver another airplane for months). Even before 2020, Airbus launched the A321XLR which used the more fuel efficient engines like the Neo did and was about where the Boeing mid-market plane was supposed to be. This made Boeing just toss out most of the work they'd done on the new design as Airbus changed the market on them. They showed up to the Farnborough Air Show with a new 737 MAX model they may never actually make and nothing else of note. It's amazing to have seen them fall so far so fast.Tnuctip posted:As a foundry professional this thread has me all hot and bothered. Seriously though maybe, maaaaybe, you could over come internal voids by 3D printing metal powder and then oven sintering. Not for a turbine blade, but wait sintering changes the part geometry in very hard to predict ways so lol at getting it right on the first or 2nd try. Also Yeah, the single crystal stuff is interesting because it sounds like it makes no sense, but there's years worth of research in the field and so far it looks like you can get superalloys used in aerospace to a single crystal orientation through a laser deposition. The problem is that people read these reports like they are the abstracts to the studies that say red wine and chocolate are good for you. They ignore the fact that the segments are thinner than a dime and that it's only really good for repairing existing parts rather than making new ones. There's also little evidence they are more stable than a regular weld repair. If the fix works it's a nice cost savings over having to replace the part, but you won't see anyone clambering to try and make the part entirely with additive processes. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 18:58
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Gresh posted:i work for the failing new york times They said failing large company not failing large industry!
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Jul 19, 2022 19:28
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pretty soft girl posted:This recently happened at a company I worked at. Medium size software development copy in the middle of nowhere, USA. Pay was under industry average, but we had a 35 hour work week, good benefits, a generally happy company culture, and satisfied customers. Everyone in management was promoted from the ground up, not a single person on our board of VPs didn't at least do some form of programming in their day. At my current company, my boss and the CTO were both Javascript developers, so I'm not sure this is a good thing. (Actually it is because they are both also cool people who care about the product over short-term profit and know how to balance the two nicely)
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Jul 19, 2022 19:29
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Lazyfire posted:Yeah, the single crystal stuff is interesting because it sounds like it makes no sense, but there's years worth of research in the field and so far it looks like you can get superalloys used in aerospace to a single crystal orientation through a laser deposition. The problem is that people read these reports like they are the abstracts to the studies that say red wine and chocolate are good for you. They ignore the fact that the segments are thinner than a dime and that it's only really good for repairing existing parts rather than making new ones. There's also little evidence they are more stable than a regular weld repair. If the fix works it's a nice cost savings over having to replace the part, but you won't see anyone clambering to try and make the part entirely with additive processes. I work in characterization, not materials science, and not for aerospace, but I see a lot of people trying to do additive manufacturing of metals or ceramics for high performance applications. Trying to figure out how you'd possibly do a single crystal turbine blade is giving me a headache. I have seen some neat applications for powdered metal printers, especially those with multiple feeds where you can do mixed metal parts with complex geometries, but even there it's very unclear how resilient those parts will be.
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Jul 19, 2022 19:50
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