This is great, were getting to know more about each other aside from the common interests of Buicks. You guys are AWESOME
What a great thread! I took early retirement three years ago from Enterprise Holdings. I was a VP in their Fleet Management division for 33 years. Prior to joining Enterprise, I worked at an Oldsmobile dealer for seven years as a mechanic/parts counter guy/service writer to pay for college.
Thanks Steve. Local 25 here out of Denver. Hope to get my QEI, go to 58, as the wife has a few more years left, & spend my twighlight inspecting. That all depends on how finances, health, & life shake out though. Kyle
Drafting classes through JH and HS led me to take classes in mechanical engineering. Got my BSME in 1992. Started working for Wisne PICO (now known as Comau) doing layout and detailing on the board for body welding systems for Chrysler and GM Truck and Bus. That led into CAD design which I've now been doing for over 25 years. Started out with AutoCAD 8 and learned almost every CAD system since. Catia, Unigraphics, Pro-E, SolidWorks etc... I've worked for several companies over 25 years designing/engineering automotive/aerospace tooling. The highlight of my career, so far, was working for a company that secured a DOD contract to engineer dynamic helicopter test stands used in Corpus Christi Army Depot. They were basically massive gear boxes used to dyno test transmissions for Black Hawks, Apache, Chinook, Iroquois, and Kiowa. Here's a quick video of one of the test stands our team engineered and built. This test stand is powered by 4 3000hp GE motors: We also engineered and built inspection tooling for .223/5.56 shell casings for Federal Ammunition that cycled 1200 rounds/min doing various integrity checks. No video of that, for proprietary reasons but it was fun to watch all that brass fly out into the hopper. Now my life's not as glamorous. I work for a small pump company that supplies municipal and industrial pump package systems. We also engineer and build thermal heat exchange packages that are used by GM, Ford, and Chrysler in their dyno rooms to control oil and water temperatures on their test stands.
Mechanical engineer, I worked for a small company in the wireless industrial instruments field (pressure and temperature transmitters). Basically I use Solidworks to generate designs for customer specific projects as well as the relevant part and assembly drawings, bills of materials, etc. I handle the documentation end of things showing the production dept how to build it and the customer how to install it. I'm the guy people hate when they say they hate engineers. A lot of our stuff is used widely in the oil and gas industry but there are other applications. Weirdest thing the boss ever had me spend any time on was the "chicken checker". I came up with a handle design to put our temperature transmitter into a pile of frozen chickens so the chicken company can make sure nothing is thawing out.
Cool thread, I started my working years on our family owned ice cream trucks, Smoo Moo Ice Cream, soft served like Dairy Queen, then off to Texas A&M for a degree in Aquaculture and of course went to work in the Oilfield doing a very specialized service called Drill Stem Testing (checking formations for oil, gas, or water and pressure for production). Moved on to sales for a drilling contractor (professionally took people to lunch along with hunting excursions to my bosses ranch 800,000+ acres. Left the oilfield and moved to Abilene, now I work at Home Depot as the Receiving Department Head.
The last 12 years..........7 years Afghanistan, 3 years Iraq, 1 year Antarctica, 1 yr. Kurdistan,......now US State Dept, I travel to around 30-50 Embassy's/Posts around the World a year doing stuff...........
You laugh, but there is a company in my area (Select Sires) that has people actually do this on a daily basis.
Was very fortunate to work as a salesman for a employee owned industrial supply house here in Ontario. Retired after 33 years. We always owned 49% until 1995 when we purchased the remaining 51%. Blessed to have such generous owners. In 2014 Graingers purchased us. Now spending time trying to pay forward our blessings. Great to hear what you all do! Leo
That is so scary but she really is. I just pray she doesn't do the things I've done. She's smarter than me so there is hope for her yet.
Forgive my ignorance, but how exactly is this performed, by machine or manually, somebody wank the bull??
There was an episode of Dirty Jobs about horse breeding. The one dude's job was to guide the males horses junk into the female horse. Imagine doing that all day?