At the beginning of my career (1979) as a design engineer at HP, the mechanical engineer created the part design and then rendered it in pencil on paper, and then transferred it onto sheets of vellum ...

There are two reasons why. First, for any glue to stick to something, that something needs to be wettable by the glue. A cured silicone surface is bristling with uncrosslinked silicone units which ...

Except for special applications, most washers are made of dead soft steel, which deforms under the compressive load imposed by a tightened bolt head. As the washer smooshes, it minimizes stress ...

If furnished in a thin, polished sheet, aluminum will reflect infrared radiation, as for instance in a so-called "space blanket" which consists of a thin sheet of plastic on which a thin and ...

Most helicopters of modern manufacture are dynamically unstable while hovering- they require constant, "hands-on" control inputs from the pilot to keep things in balance. This task is very ...

high pulse rate + low pressure means low pumping efficiency of the heart. this can be caused by: leaking valves, especially the main aortic valve, due to disease or calcification; low blood volume, ...

To enlarge slightly upon Solar Mike's response, a jigsaw that cuts on the upstroke tends to yank the saw shoe down into firm contact with the workpiece. This guarantees that the cut angle will match ...

To add just a little to the answer from Mahendra Gunawardena, that device contains an electromagnetic coil and nearby a piece of iron that is connected to a valve mechanism. When electricity is sent ...

The answer depends on the specific type of motor you intend to use, but in general: when a motor is loaded down, it draws more current, which means its windings get hotter at the same time that the ...

Oddly enough, this problem can be fixed using a set of car keys and your wallet. Here are the steps to follow: 1) put the keys in the ignition of your car, start it, and drive to the motorcycle ...

The engineering design of towers is not limited in a practical sense by their weight, meaning that the scheme you propose solves no problems in that field. Truly gigantic balloons would be necessary ...

It is common for both the button contacts on the ends of a battery and the springy metal fingers that make contact with those buttons to get a thin film of oxide forming on them. It does not take much ...

In the past whenever I needed a rotary encoder, I took apart a computer mouse. I do not know if they will meet your requirements, but there's nothing cheaper.

In the wire & cable business, the device you describe is called a dancer, for the way its components move about while regulating the tension in a rope or wire being unspooled from a large coil. ...

The lubricant you put into the spinner bearings has both viscosity and surface tension, and it coats the rotating parts inside the bearing. Therefore, as the spinner bearing revolves, it churns the ...

Knowing the derivation is important because it usually tells you what initial assumptions were made in the derivation and what the limits of applicability of the resulting equation are. Understanding ...

these are part-tracking marks. they indicate which cavity in the mold the part was cast from, in which mold set, in what molding machine, in what year, month, day and shift. this way, a part that ...

Fiber cables have higher data transfer speed not because light travels faster in a fiber than electromagnetic waves in a copper wire, but because they can be modulated by signals having far higher ...

Mill hardening would refer to work hardening, where cold-rolling the material distorts the grain structure and causes dislocation pile-up and entanglements, which reduce the material's ductility and ...

the outside air is colder, but the flame temperature is still much much hotter than that so the difference cold inlet air makes on the outlet temperature of the furnace will be small. The same ...

The usual solution is to build a fence with lots of slats in it about 20 feet away from the edge of the road. The fence slows down the airflow and thereby causes the sand in it to fall out and ...

This idea doesn't work, because screwing the parts together will tend to strip the threads before the parts are fully squeezed together. Instead, engineers use different general methods to get the ...

As you add bulbs in parallel, the load impedance drops and to light all the bulbs you have to pedal harder. When the load impedance becomes less than the output impedance of the generator, then more ...

the former soviet union had plentiful stores of titanium on hand, so its expense was not an issue. Being nonmagnetic, a titanium hull would be more difficult to detect with magnetometers. Note ...

for a properly-designed (right materials, right size, right manufacture) spring of that type, the applied stresses are far too small to cause any plastic deformation (permanent bending) at all. ...

for a while, steam locomotives actually used gears and cylinder/piston sets which drove crankshafts. These were called geared locomotives and they were used to haul heavy loads up particularly steep ...

each electrochemical reaction involving a lead atom in a lead-acid cell releases two electrons into the external circuit, which means it has a relatively good extractable power-to battery mass ratio. ...

as the engine produces torque which is applied to the driveshaft, the engine block produces a counter-torque which must be blocked by bolting the block to the frame so the engine itself does not ...

The very first thing to check is the sharpness of the bit tip. a dull bit will not drill worth a d*mn and just waste your battery power. Note that it only takes one brief encounter with something hard ...

What you are missing is that it is cheaper to increase the storage capacity of a flywheel by increasing its rotating speed than it is by making the flywheel bigger. This is the reason why (proposed) ...