engineer? naw! engine-ear, um enginerr, unnhhh...
I'm an engineer, too. It p*sses me off when you have to deal with some stuffed shirt pompous donkey's backside who figures all the guys on the floor don't know anything. I get teased a lot because I tend to call for a lot of "field fit" when we're trying to put something new in the middle of a whole lot of old stuff. But the guys doing the work understand when they've done it a couple of times and realize I respect their abilities enough to allow them to "fill in the blanks".
Talk about dimensions and scales--we were building a dry kiln on a millsite a few years ago. I had a young civil engineer doing the underground and preliminary grade engineering work. He was used to working in the commercial stuff but took our work to see if he could expand his horizons. Well, the foundations were about done and it comes time to start the steel...and we are about 5" out on the foundation work. What the heck? Turns out the young feller was working in the Canadian building system--friggin metric! And the kilns were 100% feet n' inches! The elevation datum was 100--from our side, 100'-0". From his side, 100m. Thankfully, it didn't cost a lot to fix things up.
That scale issue can be a bummer, too. I tell my contractors to never, never scale a drawing. Call the engineer and make him tell you the dimension. They ain't doing their job if they leave dimensions off of the drawing that you need to get the job done. And I don't care if they call him directly--I don't need to get in the middle to take the edge off a busy contractors not-so-polite request for proper information!!
Wanna see a consulting engineer sweat? Give him a job where he is responsible for his screwups! For example, if his drawings are wrong, he pays towards fixing the job. I was able to get that done on a job--talk about improving the quality of the drawings!! They actually came around and measured--multiple times! It can be pretty important when you're trying to fit new stuff in an old mill.
The real group I got no use for is the Architects. They go to school and get a degree in painting or basketweaving or something equally useless and then get into drawing up pretty buildings. Most of this crap is sucked up by governments or high profit businesses (like banks) to build an enormously-expensive building that could have been built a lot less costly without their "services". (Engineers have to go in after an architect does their cartoons and figure out how to build it anyway.) I was investigating building a new plant once, where the boss challenged me: "well, we're in the wood business, why the heck don't we build our buildings out of wood?" Reasonable question--the building was originally gonna be a standard steel building covered with tin. Just like a zillion shops across North America. Since the building had to be a pretty big clear span--140 feet-- it was going to be a challenge to do it in wood. I talked to an architect who was doing a lot of wood buildings. No problem, son, we can do that for under $2 million. I said thank you and hung up. We did it for just under $500,000. Found some Civil engineer types who weren't pompous windbags who quietly burnt out the bearings on their slide rules and came up with an economical design.
Sorry! Rant mode: off!!
Jon.
guess they wanted a 10% discount on the AB & AC
