I have two degrees, my first one is in General Mechanical Engineering and my other one is an advanced degree in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Having these two degrees allows me to deal with both large structures and small machine parts.

I was brought in on a case that involved common sense and a mechanism problem. A factory worker was cleaning a large grinding machine, a steel table that transverses back and forth with a big grinding wheel. This large circular wheel was heavy and thick. The operator was cleaning this machine and the grinding wheel came down, fell on his arm and permanently damaged his arm so he could no longer work at his job ever again. There was litigation against the company that made the machine and the company that he worked for, however it was a touchy situation, he did’t want to hurt his company because he wanted to continue to work for them.

The problem was with a single nut that held this whole grinding mechanism up. This nut was in a small rectangular box that was hidden. You could not see this nut, even if you did the maintenance on this machine. This nut just came undone, it did’t break and fundamentally there was no way to lock the nut in. This is not against OASHA standards, but it is not a good design because you were not able to see the nut.

We won for 1.2 million dollars mainly against the company that made the machine. I had to work with the individual whom had been hurt to get his story, had to obtain drawings, and had to have good PR with the company to be able to go in to the factory because I had to see the machine. I worked well with the lawyer assigned to this case; he kept bringing me in asking over and over again about the story, phrasing it different each time, making sure I had my story straight and I had to do several depositions. I used simple mechanical engineering on this case; no computers were involved. The final outcome of this case is that we won and did not have to go to court.

This litigation case involves a situation where a part actually broke. There was a big cutting tool that cut large holes and was mainly used for a face of a clock where you put the actual clock mechanism itself in. This cutting tool was heavy and used a large drill bit that was put into a drill press. Nobody knows what actually happened but the drill press was able to spin at a fairly high rpm and the drill broke and sent the drill bit flying. It hit a student right between the eyes, fortunately the sharpest part of the bit did’t hit the eye but there was significant damage done.

Working on solving how this accident was possible I was able to say that if this rotated at such and such speed, and we had such and such offset it could go flying. We were never actually able to get the straight story, either everybody lied or could’t remember. The suit was settled out of court, it was not a huge win financially, but the student and mother were satisfied, and the lawyer got his percent.

Most cases take 1 to 3 years to settle so there’s a lot of patience required. I have been involved in 20 to 30 cases over the years but take on no more than 3 in a year; this keeps me out of the realm of being a hired gun. I use my expertise and weave myself through the problem, working well with the lawyers. I have never had a law case that was simple, there almost always in the twilight zone.

In 1999 the Gas Turbine division of a Fortune 500 company, which makes fuel nozzles for jet engines, hired me and sent me to the plant in upstate New York because they were having a terrible rework problem with a certain fuel nozzle. These nozzles are sort of like fuel injections for a car but a little more complicated, you can actually hold these units in your hand as they are about the size of a 45 revolver. These parts were being made in 5 different plants and at this particular plant they were making fuel nozzles, for the big bypass gas turbine engine that is used in the 777 Boeing. These turbine engines have about 15 different kinds of nozzles, half military, half commercial.

The problem was so bad that according to GE they had gas turbine engines, which are quite large, sitting on the assembly line with no nozzles (there are 45 of them in a engine) and they could go no further. They realized that part of the problem was involved with cracking for the weld and that is why they hired me, as my specialty is pied, cracks, and welding.

It turns out that the real problem was the environment in the manufacturing process. The parts were stored on carts with their welded surface facing upward. In this area there was actually oil dripping from the ceilings onto the parts, and even if it didn’t drip directly onto the part there was so much in the air that it was impossible to keep these parts clean for very long.

A second problem was the parts themselves didn’t fit up and this was a supplier problem, however the factory could do something with it using a welding process called ‘TIG’. This particular process is used with argon gas to keep the weld area clean. However, the argon was contaminated by a whole bunch of pipes that it had to run through which were made out of the wrong kind of material to carry that specific kind of gas.

The last thing was that they were switching operators sometimes every 15 minutes; this was their idea of lean manufacturing. So to begin to fix the problem what I managed to have them do was; cover parts up so the oil didn’t drip on them, then clean the parts extra carefully sometimes running the whole part through the cleaning line again, kept the parts clean and then cleaned them again just before the welding process. The accounting for where all the parts were was not accurate, this was good for me though because I was able to set the parts that didn’t fit aside. We then only used the good parts that fit and we purged the argon for 10 minutes before the welding process, this got rid of the bad argon that was sitting in the pipes. I also had them quit switching operators every 15 minutes, actually keeping the same operators on the same operations for this particular nozzle. The bottom line is after this process we went from 1 reject in 10 to 1 out of 650 being bad, that is saying basically we had no rejections what so ever.

The company had lost 4 million dollars on this one nozzle alone and had brought in many consultants. They all recommended different materials and different weld times but missed the most obvious thing. After hiring me the company quit losing money. There were other parts of the process that had similar problems and while I was there for the next 3 years we managed to tackle them. The plant was smart enough to keep the same operators working on the nozzle assembly but it ran with no interference from engineers, as it was no longer necessary. The basic idea was to get the big matter out of the way first so you could see what was going on with the more refined parts.

While working for the same Fortune 500 company as above there was another plant, located in Ohio, that made heat exchanger units. There was a brazing problem with these large heat exchangers, which were made out of aluminum, in where there were holes being created during the brazing process. This process is one of submersing the whole unit into a bath of molten salt. Salt has some real advantages for brazing but it also has a disadvantage, which is that salt can eat a hole in the unit due to the salt causing corrosion.

They were immersing this unit into a vat of salt for 3 minutes; which is the magic number that they had been using for 35 years. Even though they had 50% rejection or higher using this process they continued to use the same process for 35 years, these rejections were horrific. The units were cylindrical in shape, if you put your arms out and made a circle, that is about how big around the exchanger was, and about 2 feet in height. On the production line floor you would have all these units with huge holes cut in them stacked up to the ceiling and they would mark where the leak was with big red paint – it was just terrible.

They had been using this brazing process for 35 years and it was interesting though to tell within the company if this was a recent or old problem. If it was recent that meant something had been changed in the process and if it was old then there was something basically wrong with how they were doing it; half of the operators said it was ancient and the other half said it was recent. The group that said it was old could see during the pressurization process if there was a hole and then this part would go in to a specific welder, this welder then would magically weld up the hole. If you saw this process you knew there were lots of heat exchangers coming out of the brazing process with holes all this time, if you weren’t in the group that saw the pressurization process then you weren’t aware of the welding being done and thought there were no holes. So the bottom line was this was a common problem that had been going on for 35 years and no one had looked at the process even though they had these parts stacked up to be welded.

I discovered that the main thing that was wrong with the unit was that they were keeping it in the salt too long, but the salt wasn’t actually doing anything to its corrosion. It was the alloy, which is like the solder, would run under 3 minutes and then would cut a groove into certain parts of the heat exchanger and the groove would create a leak. So the solution was to cut the braze time down from 3 minutes to 1 minute.

This problem had plagued them for 35 years and now after those 35 years, with my discovery, they have no rejections.

Most recently I suggested to the army that they abort a certain test program they had out at Yuma Proving Ground. My recommendation was that we would just sit over the project and go over a simpler type of tack that would take a whole lot less time and money without using any computer analysis.

We had a situation with the army where there was a bad design on a part used in the Striker Vehicle, which are tactical vehicles for the army. The bad design basically was with the spindle that holds the wheel on. Our military has over 300 Strikers in Iraq and 40 of them had lost wheels. There was a possibility that if the vehicle lost a wheel in the right circumstance somebody from our side could be killed, this was a serious situation.

There is a certain amount of coordination between the army in this case, or the military and the government in general, and the contractors. I have a tendency to be able to bridge that gap between them. I was able to see that a lot of the design decisions that were being made were only sometimes a very small part of the solution and that the bigger part was on the manufacturing floor where they can mess up.

The spindle for the Striker has a groove with a curvature. At the corners of the groove the curvature was supposed to be at least 6 millimeters in radius, and it was turning out that sometimes it was less that 1 millimeter. It was obvious that this was a manufacturing process, if someone would have just seen the drawing than they would have seen that 6 millimeters is just a little shy of what we’d like in terms of bigness, we actually would like it bigger, the bigger the better.

Where it could have been solved 9 months ago with less money, it only took me 2 days work to assess that all you had to do was get rid of the surface treatment as it made no sense to do it only for wear as there was nothing being worn on the spindle, making the notch bigger will stop the failures. This is a manufacturing kind of situation where I can get in and sort through in such a way that I end up knowing some things that the government, by itself, doesn’t get to know.