Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6S25 Andy Thompson | Practical Applications of GD&T
In this episode, Andy Thompson discussed his journey from machinist to expert in GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing). He highlighted the importance of understanding GD&T for effective design, manufacturing, and quality control. Thompson shared examples of how GD&T improved manufacturing processes, such as aerospace parts and defense contracts. He emphasized the need for early identification of manufacturing processes and the benefits of collaborative design. Thompson also discussed the value of networking and continuous learning in the engineering field, advocating for more engagement and communication within the engineering community.
Main Topics:
- Transition from machinist to engineering professional
- Fundamentals of Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)
- Practical applications of GD&T in manufacturing
- Collaborative design processes
- Importance of communication in engineering
About the guest: Andy Thompson, P.E., is a seasoned mechanical and manufacturing engineer with over 20 years of experience, beginning as a CNC operator and advancing to manager of structural engineering at Northrop Grumman. He is an expert in GD&T, holding ASME Y14.5 Senior Level certification, and emphasizes design for manufacturability, assembly, and inspection. Andy is also an active mentor and contributor to the engineering community, combining hands-on expertise with strategic leadership to drive innovation and quality across the field.
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of The being an engineer podcast. Today, we're joined by Andy Thompson, a seasoned mechanical and manufacturing engineer renowned for his expertise in GDT with over two decades of hands on experience, Andy has progressed from CNC operations to leading structural engineering teams. His passion for precision and continuous improvement makes him a supremely valuable and sought after voice in the engineering community. Thanks so much for being with us today. Andy, Me as well. Me as well. I've been looking forward to this conversation. So tell us what made you decide to become an engineer.
Andy Thompson:Yeah, so I kind of initially started my career as a machinist, and worked for it was a contract manufacturer job shop. And you know, we dealt with a lot of different customers, a lot of different industries, a lot of product. And, you know, it came pretty obvious to me early on that I, you know, I really enjoyed that kind of work, building things, making things, solving those kind of problems. But I wanted to be involved solving problems at an additional level beyond that. I wanted to get into the design realm. I wanted to help solve some of these problems, more than just on the shop floor after they started. I wanted the chance to kind of solve them before they happen, so to speak. So it drove me towards engineering at that point,
Aaron Moncur:Terrific that your experience machining is so valuable. I wish that all engineers could have that experience. I had nowhere near as much as you did, but I did spend a summer, basically, as a, I would say, a light machinist on a manual mill and a manual lathe, making designing and then making my own fixtures. And it was so helpful, you know, to get a real sense for how parts are made. Because as a designer, it just, it's immensely valuable. What was your favorite part about being a machinist?
Andy Thompson:You know, really just building kind of from scratch, right? You start today with a sheet of paper and a chunk of metal, and, you know, you go to your machine, you figure out the process, you get the tools that you need. You know, when it's all said and done, this, this thing that was nothing more than an idea is now a reality. It's high precision, it's it's very creative work. It's very difficult work. And so, you know, having that at the end of the day to look at a cart full of parts, or one part that's maybe even taken weeks, and say, you know, I created this and and be able to wrap your hands around that and verify, and then see it, go into an assembly, go out and function and perform some thing out in the world that it was designed to do is immensely rewarding. And it was incredibly fun to be on that side of the manufacturing of
Aaron Moncur:it, right? It sounds just incredibly fulfilling, right? To see and I mean, I think that's one of my favorite parts about engineering, is that it's it is eventually you get to see the part, the assembly, the product in your hands, right? You hold it, you use it, and hopefully it's performing some kind of useful feature or work. And as a machinist, you got to see that like every day, right? These new parts that you just created from from a hunk of metal. Do you remember what was the the most challenging part that you made?
Andy Thompson:Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a couple that stand out. I had one particular for an aerospace company, very large part made out of a big, I want to say, 10 to 12 inches diameter in titanium. Wow, oh. 1214, inches long. And, you know, the chunk of material itself was several $1,000 the the shop owner walked by and reminded me that I was a very expensive piece of material. Don't mess this one up. No pressure, yeah, no pressure. Just, just get it right the first time. And, you know, the the tolerances that were on it, the geometry that was on it. I mean, it took weeks, you know, roughing the part out, making sure nothing went wrong. You know, titanium sensitive to temperature, so make sure we're not doing anything that's going to change the state of the metal right, doing anything that's going to cause problems down the road. So that, that was, by far, my, my most memorable part that came out for a single part, wow, or other aerospace parts that we made that were, you know, maybe not quite as difficult or as intricate, but very difficult, and to build a process around it, right? So to build something one time is a different challenge than to say we have to build a process to build 100. Hundreds or 1000s of these, and we have to do it repeatably, and we have to do it affordably, right? They take a different mindset. They take a different mindset in design, and they take a different mindset in manufacturing. So seeing both sides of that was was really rewarding and really educational.
Aaron Moncur:Well, eventually, your your journey from machinist to engineer led you into the realm of Gd and T, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing. Tell us a little bit about that. How did you find yourself in GD and T and you really are an expert, a trusted voice in the community at this point. How did you get there?
Andy Thompson:Yeah. So you know, I started as a machinist, seeing all the different products, all the different designs coming from different customers, different industries, and seeing everyone using GD and T differently and rarely was it used correctly, kind of drove me towards really digging into The skill set for myself. My employer, at the time, arranged a pretty basic course with, you know, with a local person to come in for a few nights during the week and give us some kind of high level training so that we had some understanding of it. And that's, that's really all it took for me. I was hooked from that point forward. And, you know, seeing the power of it, what it could do if used correctly, seeing how often it was used incorrectly. I was able to connect with with that instructor. He kind of became my GD and T mentor, right? And he started walking me through the standard, helping me understand it. And kind of from that point forward, just years and years of reading the standard, looking at drawings, looking at parts, figuring out what it means from a design perspective, versus manufacturing versus inspection. You know, all those different aspects all play into that one standard. And kind of how they play together, was just super fascinating. So I've, I've spent a lot of time digging through it, studying it, conversing with people, how about this? What if this and honestly being wrong about a lot of different things, and figuring out why I'm wrong and working to fix it. So
Aaron Moncur:you mentioned that I think this was during your time as machinist, oftentimes engineers would use GD and T incorrectly on the drawings. What what are some of the common mistakes or misconceptions that engineers have about Gd and T, and how do you address those?
Andy Thompson:So some of the common misconceptions first are, you know, if you see a drawing that's fully defined with Gd and t, it automatically, kind of causes some people to panic. You've over complicated something, right? And so this, this can drive people away. And this is really, you know, that couldn't really be further from the truth, right? When we're looking at fully defining the variation allowable in a part, right? Let's just take a very quick example. And let's think about just a, you know, a cylindrical shaft that has a couple of different diameters on it, right? And we think about a drawing that doesn't have GD and T it's going to have the couple of different diameters, and their tolerance is called out, and that's pretty much all. It's going to say some lengths in there. And, you know, shops are going to look at this, and they're going to put it on a lathe, and they're going to turn all the diameters at the same time, and the coaxiality error between all of these diameters is going to be very tightly controlled because of that process. Right? We turn everything at one time very tight coaxiality control. But something changes, and maybe we have to do it in two setups. We have to work on one side, stop, flip it around to another side. Now from one side to the other is going to have higher coaxiality error. Or let's take this a step further, and maybe all my lathes are busy, but my mills have time, and geometrically, I can create this, this part, I can hit the tolerances that are provided on my mill. So I take it on my mill, and now I mill these features. Well, it's still going to be, you know, still precision machining, but there's going to be a greater coaxiality error in the milled part versus the turned part. How much error is there? It hasn't been defined on the drawing, and now we have parts that we inspect meet all of our diametrical tolerances, but they don't assemble. They don't function. Something's wrong. We haven't even checked for coaxiality error because it wasn't on the drawing. We don't know how much is allowable, and still have our part function a fully defined part with Gd and T tells us how much variation is allowed on every feature, right? So that shouldn't intimidate someone, that should really make them feel good about the fact that I know what is allowable on this part, I know every state of good versus bad, it's been defined. I have to learn how to interpret that, but now I know what makes a good functional part. And as a designer, I know what has to be defined to communicate that. As a manufacturer, I know how to integrate that into my process and as a quality inspector. I know what needs to be verified to make sure this part is going to work the way it's intended,
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Aaron Moncur:So let's talk about those three areas, design, manufacturing, quality there. There are three thought, three sides of the same coin, really, how? How does GD and T tie them together is, is g, d and t, a tool or language that can be used to collaborate between those those three disciplines?
Andy Thompson:Absolutely, it is. And that's really, I think one of the big reasons why I latched on to it so early on, is working in manufacturing and trying to work with design to really understand what's going on, right? It's that language that that tells us what we could do in pages and pages of notes and explanation and papers to say with a few symbols, right? Once we understand things, right? So that tool becomes the common language that all three different worlds are speaking about the same part, right? They may be thinking about things from a different perspective. My design brain tells me I have to make sure that these two parts always fit together every single time. My manufacturing brain says I need to make sure I have these features tied in and done, maybe in the same operation or with the same tool, to avoid any potential variation between the two of them, or to greatly reduce that potential variation, my inspection brain says I'm going to need to make sure that I have some type of fixture that adequately sets up on my datum reference frame. That is my datum feature simulator. To start verifying this data from this is going to mimic the part in the assembly and tell us accurately what it's going to look like to the mating parts
Aaron Moncur:you talked about. Sometimes a part can be machined to the specifications on the drawing, but maybe those specifications didn't quite have the right design intent behind them, whether it's with Gd and T or something else. Can you think of and share an example of when you or someone else on the team was able to apply GD and T, and that application of Gd and T moved the needle for the project, the process, the component, whatever it was,
Andy Thompson:yeah, I mean, there's, there's two really good specific examples for this. We had one, again, this was at the machine shop, but a customer had brought us a new housing manifold. Kind of part that they had big, tight tolerance. Part, expensive, part, fairly complex in geometry. And their their drawing was, was terrible, their GD, if there was a GD and T rule that existed, they broke it, and they did it consistently. And as they were consistent, they were very consistent, and that was helpful. And as they had taken this part to other suppliers. They would try to qualify them. They would have them build five parts at a time, take them back and test them. And never would there be more than two, maybe three parts that would ever function for them. And they finally brought this to us, and we sat down with them, and the first thing we tried to talk to them about is how terrible their drawing was. And sometimes when the manufacturer, the supplier, is going to the designer, the customer, and says, I think there are problems here. That's not always well received, and that's just part of the reality of the industry that we're in. So instead, we focused on, you know, learn what the part is intended to do we. We had them walk through the assembly process, its functionality, how the different parts mate together, what their interfaces are, and we kind of took it on ourselves to make our own GD and T version of the drawing. And then we sat down and built our manufacturing process around it, and we built our five parts. Sent them to the customer, all five parts worked fantastically. Wow. We were able to start, you know, we built hundreds and hundreds of these parts to our modified drawing, because when we tried to do it off of theirs, nothing seemed to work.
Aaron Moncur:Phenomenal. Did they ever come back at the end and say, Wow, clearly, Gd and T is something we should learn better. Can you teach us? Can you help us?
Andy Thompson:Unfortunately, they didn't. They. They took their win and left for the day, I suppose you could say, but you know, we're able to make the parts and move on.
Aaron Moncur:So that's awesome. What a great experience. Yeah, you know, I
Andy Thompson:had a similar, similar time in it was actually a defense contract. The the parts, the drawings were actually drawn GD and T was done exceptionally well. The existing manufacturer didn't understand GD and T, and so they weren't integrating it into their process. They were having quality issues. They were had they had scrap problems, they had delivery problems. And so when we sat down and looked at the very well done GD and T and built it into the manufacturing process, use their datum reference frame as our fixture points when we could, when we couldn't, make sure that we had control dimensions or ways of fixture to control our variation, when we utilize the tool of Gd and T properly, our manufacturing process came together magnificently and built hundreds and hundreds of parts with this setup, with no quality issues to the best of my knowledge.
Aaron Moncur:Wow, that's amazing. You obviously have spent a lot of time with design and manufacturing. Design for Manufacturing. What are, what are some of the places that design engineers commonly stumble and and how could they fix this with Gd and T?
Andy Thompson:Yes, so, I mean, Gd and T is a tool like anything else, right? And so used correctly, it by itself, doesn't necessarily solve manufacturing issues outside of telling the manufacturer how the part works together, but things within the design. Let's take a machine part for an example, and we have a machined pocket with sharp corners, right? This is a common thing that we see happen all the time. It's not impossible to make. We can put it on some type of a sink or EDM, make it die, put it in there. Cost you 10 times as much, take three times as long, but it can be done if your product requires that, and it's not done because someone didn't understand it. It's certainly worth doing, but those type of design for manufacture processes are are handled through any other kind of design process that you'd have right a collaborative design methodology starts with with talking with your stakeholders, talking with people involved if you're in design, talk with manufacturing, talk with inspection. And it doesn't have to be a formal, two hour meeting with 50 people in a room, arguing and never getting anything done. It can be as simple as having some back and forth conversations very early on in the process, right? Understand what your intent is. Talk to them. They're going to tell you some things like, Hey, make sure you don't do this. Make sure you try and do this right. Just those simple conversations up front can save hours and hours, and that sometimes weeks and weeks. But that type of of relationship building, that collaboration is a tool like anything else that engineers can use to improve their process, no matter what side of the gate they're on whether it's design, manufacturing, inspection, even procurement, for that matter, right with supply chain issues that we've seen very prominent, picking the right material sometimes can change the ball game. So make sure these conversations are had, at least at a very fundamental level. I think you'd be surprised at how quickly it changes the the results that you get.
Aaron Moncur:How do you know if your shop really understands GD and T? Because, like you said, not all shops do, right? So let's say that your team is like this customer, you had excellent at g d and t, get it all right, the language is clear, and you sent it off to a shop, and if they don't know GD and T, well, the what do I call this? The sentiments that I have heard from engineers is that they don't like using GD and T because it makes the parts more expensive because the shop sees it, they automatically think to themselves, Oh, this is super high precision, which you've already debunked, is not necessarily the case, but perhaps a shop that doesn't have a lot of experience with GDT might think that, or they might just say, great, no problem. We can do this. We understand all the GD and T. Yeah, but they don't really any pro tips for, like, auditing your shop to really know what they're talking
Andy Thompson:about. Yeah, what I mean first thing is, you know what you just mentioned, right? If you show them a GD and T drawing and they go, Oh, this is really over complicated. That should be your first red flag, right? Your your manufacturers should be ecstatic that you have fully defined the part in GD and t, because now they know what they need to build right now, I say static, if you're using GD and T correctly, if you've slapped a concentricity tolerance and a block tolerance on something and said, Hey, now it's fully defined. That's not using it correctly, that's not doing it well. And I understand why people swear about that. So some of the other tips that we've we've seen, and this actually came out in a meeting I had somewhat recently, less than a year ago, someone talked about they made, they made a product, or they made a part, a drawing with two different tolerances on it, there's a concept in GD and T called zero at MMC. Essentially what it does is it ties the size of a clearance feature in with the relationship of the position of the clearance feature. And it says, As long as you protect a boundary, you can vary size or position all you want within this boundary. It's a fairly simple concept, once you understand it, but on the drawing, it shows a zero at MMC tolerance. So people that don't understand GD and t see that see a zero tolerance, you'll get no quotes. You'll get insanely high quotes, when in fact, you have maximized the allowable tolerance for them, you've done one of the best things you can do in a clearance application, that doesn't mean zero to MMC, is that you know social solution every problem, but for that particular case, it's a great tool to help understand and so in conversation, he sent out one drawing that had the typical tolerances, like you would expect to see a size and position tolerance that were separated and another that had zero at MMC, where they were all tied together, and see who comes back with either no quotes or better prices was zero at MMC, right? And it kind of helped define Okay, these guys, at least have a fundamental understanding of Gd and T Yeah. And you know, we can start to work with them, clever, nice and obviously, you know, those kind of things. I don't know if you want to call them trickery or not, but there's ways to kind of test people honestly. You know, conversations can can reveal it very quickly, right? If you have a person knowledgeable in GD and t you can start talking about how certain things are done when they have these types of call outs. How do they treat them? What do they do? Right? Those kind of things can be pretty telling about how well they understand it. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. Are there situations where GD and T should not be used
Andy Thompson:if you're building the house, maybe,
Aaron Moncur:okay, so effectively, you should be able to use it for any kind of precision
Andy Thompson:part, any type of precision part, and especially one where you're going to have any type of mechanically driven interface, right where you have, you know, component A inserting into component B, and it either has to have interference, or it has to have clearance, or has to be able to move in some particular way while it's in an assembly. Or we have to be able to say, you know, we have all 10 parts bolted up, and there's a hole on the top and a hole on the bottom, and they have to be able to do the same thing at the same time, right? This is, this is the power that Gd and T brings. Is it allows us to evaluate that and make sure that functionality is there.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. All right. Andy, I'm going to take a short break here, and I want to plug the wave. The wave dot engineer. A lot of you have probably heard me mention the name, at least, but may or may not have visited the site, just type in the wave dot engineer, and you'll pull it right up. There are all kinds of really cool, useful tools that we've got there. There, there are forums and articles and things like that. But there, there's also a page of mentors this. These are senior engineers who have agreed and and are interested in mentoring younger engineers, so you can connect with a mentor on the wave. There are CAD downloads. We call them our Design Accelerators. These are, it's kind of like the no code version of CAD design, where it's a mechanism, for example, or some type of component that's already designed and can be applied in a variety of situations. Drop that into your assembly and speed up your design process. One of my favorites is there's a device holder. So if you need to hold a device for you know, in a fixed string or some kind of test environment, we have a device holder file that you can very quickly update to accommodate your. Specific component geometry and so anyway, there are a host of different tools and educational content on the site. There past webinars that we've recorded on GD and T and other things as well. So check out the wave dot engineer if you haven't already moving on. We are privileged to be able to speak with Andy Thompson today, Gd and T and engineer extraordinaire. So GD and T is, like many things in life, it's not stagnant. It changes over time. How do you stay current with the changes in these engineering standards?
Andy Thompson:You know, a lot of it is just taking the time to to read the new revision, understand the differences between them, and understand the the world that these standards live within. Right? I recently attended the ASME committee meeting here a few weeks ago, and I don't think even, you know, even with the work that I've done, had a full grasp of the depth of the world, of the ASME standards that are out there, and there are, you know, they exist for so many different industries, for so many different applications, and the people, The true experts that are there in developing and maintaining these standards, you know, are truly experts in this type of a field. You know, first time in a long time I've been in a room like that where I truly felt like the rookie when it came to my knowledge of standards, because these people truly put me to shame. But, you know, taking that time to read, understand, you know, you mentioned, kind of find some mentors here, right? Find people that are experts in that. And for the most part, if someone has taken the time to really gain expertise in a field they love nothing more than talking about it. So engage them in conversation. Help them. Help you learn where the changes are and how to stay up to date and how to use them, right? So, networking, communication, collaboration, are some of the biggest tools you can use to stay current with
Aaron Moncur:that. You seem to me that you're you're pretty skilled with networking. I mean, I see you on LinkedIn, I see your posts on LinkedIn. It seems like you're pretty well plugged in to the community there. How did you how did you start doing that? Because a lot of engineers, right? We we want to go in a dark room, close the door, and just sit and be by ourselves on the computer. I know I definitely have times when I feel like that's what I want to do, and it can feel a little uncomfortable to kind of come out of our shells and put ourselves out there a little bit. Did this always come naturally to you, or did you have to work on it? How did you make that happen for yourself? No,
Andy Thompson:I definitely think there's, there's a similar part, you know, of my personality. I just Just leave me in a room with with a computer and a calculator and let me just do some cool stuff, right? I definitely want that. But at the same time, like, as you start, like I said, once you start engaging with people in the field, and you get in contact with these very passionate people about the same subjects that you might have a passion or curiosity about, it's so much easier to break down those lines of communication, right? I don't have the ability to go to a business conference and talk about business for two days, because it doesn't have that much interest to me, but you put me in a room with other mechanical engineers talking about Gd and T or other types of tolerancing, inspection, manufacturing, the same things I'm passionate about, and it becomes very difficult to shut us up not to start the conversation. So, you know, find people of similar interest to do that. And then, you know, for the, let's say the social networking side of it, right? Well, LinkedIn is considered a professional network. There's certainly that social network aspect to it. You know, that really came about a little less than a year ago, and it honestly started with that same conversation that I talked about where someone talked about using zero at MMC to prove out their suppliers. This is I had never heard of someone doing this. And, you know, within my internal network, I had talked about it a little bit, and I was really kind of curious how this was being viewed in the world at large. So, I mean, where else do you go to find opinions from random strangers, but the internet. So put it on LinkedIn, and for as technical as the content was, I got a very high amount of reception. A lot of people engaged with it. They read it. There was comments on it, it was shared, and it really kind of surprised me. And here, a few months later, I had a similar question. I don't remember what it was, and so I tried it again, I put it on LinkedIn, and very similarly, it was very well received. A lot of people responded, commented, engaged with it, and I found people reaching out to me to ask questions about what I was posting. And so it just, you know, it took a few times, but it evolved in. Of these weekly posts talking about very technical subject matter that I really never thought would get any type of of engagement on any type of social platform. And it's been very well received. It's been a really a lot of fun to engage with all kinds of different people. You know, I get to learn things from different subject matter, experts in different design fields, different types of products, both in design, manufacturing process, and have these types of conversations where anyone who wants to participate can come and learn, can join the fun and and grow their skill set, or help others grow their skill set. Right? So to see that type of participation on such a technical subject has been great fun, and so that's why I've kind of continued, at least, you know, I try to, at least once a week, put something out there that hopefully sparks, drives conversations and questions.
Aaron Moncur:I love that. I love the idea of just helping other engineers. I i I think that engineers are the superheroes of our world. I mean, really, genuinely think about everything that we maybe take for granted, but but have around us and like contribute to our quality of life, our human experience. 90% of that was developed by engineers. Right the cars that we drive, the infrastructure that we enjoy, the fan that cools us down, the phone we use to communicate with our loved ones and connect with other people. All these things were developed by engineers. And I just think that engineers are, I don't want to say undervalued, but I don't think the world knows us well enough the world doesn't understand what engineering has brought to to our society, to our species. So I appreciate everything that you're doing out there, Andy, just building up the community and helping younger engineers, and maybe older engineers as well, understand the tools better, and helping them get better at designing and developing things that will continue improving our human experience. The Product Development Expo, or PDX, is your chance to learn from subject matter experts, providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p, d, e, x, p, O. Dot engineer,
Andy Thompson:yeah, you know absolutely agree it's, it's really fun to sit and think about this, you know, we, we take drives in our cars, and, you know, my wife will yell at me because I'm gawking out the window with a power pole or an antenna tower, just some random thing, and start to talk about, you know, the the hours of engineering time that had to go into this that nobody has thought about, right. Look at a look at a stoplight right, hanging at your intersection, and we curse when it turns red. And you sit there and look at it while the winds blowing, and it bobs up and down six or eight inches because of the strain involved with it. And think about the amount of time that had to go into calculating the joint strength, the stiffness of the material, and the fatigue life that this thing experiences over 50 Years of sitting there bouncing in the wind, someone had to sit down and figure all that out and make sure it works. Yep, and every single product that you look at has something similar involved with it, whether it's a paper cup you're drinking your coffee out of or the car that you drove to get there, an engineer was involved, and that is really an awesome thing to be a part of.
Aaron Moncur:I could not have said it better myself, phenomenal. I have this habit of looking at especially earlier in my career, when I was doing a lot more with plastic injection molding design, I would look at consumer products, plastic parts, right? And kind of analyze how they were made. I would look for parting lines, and I would look for for, you know, indications of where the shut off were was, and set actions and things like this. And after my wife and I got married, we take walks around the neighborhood. That was our thing. In the evenings, we take a walk around the neighborhood, and I one of these times I had something with me, I don't know, as a water bottle or something, and I was looking at it and inspecting it. My wife, she turns to me, and she says, What are you doing? And and I said, Well, I'm trying to figure out, you know, like, how this was made, and what how the geometry was created, and what manufacturing process was used. She looked at me like, I'm an idiot. She says, it's plastic. That's all it is. It's plastic, you know, it's gross oversimplification, which, you know, I Don't falter but, but I think that is just like anyone would think for or any discipline in which they are not an expert. You just don't have the appreciation for it, because he haven't learned about it. But, yeah, anyway, I'm starting to ramble at this point.
Andy Thompson:It's, you know, it's very much there. And I think a lot of people I know, I definitely do the same thing. I will pick up random objects that catch my eye and stare at them. You know, me and my wife have been married long enough she knows what I'm doing now. Yeah, early in the marriage, very similar, like, Why are you staring at this simple trinket, toy mechanism, whatever it is, pick up a bolt off the street and see if it was maybe machine, see if it was rolled, see if it was stamped, right? How did all this stuff come together and identify that kind of stuff, and who put the time into it? Us? Yeah, it's a lot of fun for me, and so it's, it's fun to find other people on that same wavelength. We can have these conversations, you know. And LinkedIn is an awesome place to do it, because it, it reaches a whole lot of people, and we can have these type of very nerdy conversations about stuff that we're passionate about. So that's right, yeah, awesome. Awesome platform to be able to do that, also built by engineers.
Aaron Moncur:That's right, 100% Well, we've, we've learned a lot about Andy the engineer, and I've got a few more questions that just probe a little bit into not necessarily Andy the engineer, but Andy the person. And I'd love to learn a little bit more there. And you can take these questions any way you want. You can take them, you know, career professionally. You can take them more personally, whatever, whatever you think is going to be interesting and useful for the audience here. So the first one, if you magically had an extra 20 hours per week that you can spend doing whatever you wanted, and it would not negatively impact any of your other responsibilities, what would you do at that time? Yeah, you
Andy Thompson:know, there's obviously things like, you know, friends and family is, is one of the, one of the big things we'd all love to spend more time with, right? And that would certainly be a great and worthwhile thing to do. But if we're just playing with thought experiments, and what industrious thing we might do with an with an extra 20 hours, right? I think I would like to see something like maybe, maybe dedicate half of that time to that networking and communication side, right, not just on LinkedIn, find actual events or conferences or things that you can go to to engage with like minded people, even we'll say adjacently minded people about maybe some different subject matter, and find different ways to utilize their skill sets, and find ways for them to utilize your skill sets. That communication and collaboration is a huge tool that I think the engineering community is, unfortunately, under utilizing a lot of it due to that kind of personality that we talked about. And then I think, you know, I would, I would love to be able to spend more time with those, those standards that we talked about, right? I have very good understanding of the handful of standards that I've used and gone over and and, well, not memorized, but read through thoroughly and made sure I understand every sentence, every figure, and to expand that into things where, you know, I have some experience in metrology, metrology. I'm not a metrology expert, but I'd certainly love to get more into what happens with that right. Learn more about what happens and how things come together with, say, surface texture measurement, right? Surface texture is its own micro, cosmic universe that is very much not understood. At least I don't understand it very well. I think engineers in general don't. But how much that surface texture, surface roughness, plays into the design of our world, right? It drives, it drives things like, you know, it drives friction, it drives fatigue. It's so much, and it's a fun world to sit and think about. So try and split that time between learning those new engineering skills that I'd love to just bury my head in for a while, if for nothing else, for the academic fun of it, and then spend the other half really networking, connecting, talking with people, whether it's, you know, mentoring younger people, even mentoring, I say even older people, less experienced people, right? I love to connect with some of them, because a lot of times that you know, why are you doing this question that a person who hasn't been in the industry for a year that everyone else takes for granted, makes you step back and address and think about it just a little bit different, right? This is where we can switch from incremental improvements into current product and process to you. Leaps forward and transformational changes from the right why at the right time?
Aaron Moncur:Great answers. What is something that you've always wanted to do, but for whatever reason, haven't? I
Andy Thompson:think for me personally, and this is this is more a statement of priority, I would love to learn a new language, right, a foreign language of some kind. I think would be a lot of fun, because it requires not just that academic learning. You sort of have to be immersed in the culture a little bit to really understand and master the language. Learn how to communicate with the people verbally and non verbally like that would really be a lot of fun, but it takes an incredible amount of time if you are not, for lack of a better term, dropped in the middle of that culture and forced to learn it, to learn it passively, is a very difficult thing to do, and so I've never, never set it as a high enough priority, but it would be great fun to be able to do that
Aaron Moncur:Any language in particular that you think you'd start with.
Andy Thompson:I think here, you know, so I'm in Utah, probably one of the most useful would be Spanish, right? We have a lot of Spanish speakers here. We have a lot of of that kind of heritage around here. And working in manufacturing, we work with a lot of people that that speak Spanish, and it would be awesome to be able to communicate with them. You know, a lot of them speak English very well. Some of them not so much, but be able to communicate with them more directly would would really be a good thing. And go back to that, that collaboration that I talked about, right if you can communicate with people in in in a language that is easier, more effective for them, the conversation could be more productive for you as
Aaron Moncur:well. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Duolingo? I
Andy Thompson:have, and I tried my hand man, and it just becomes another one of those, you know, priority shift, right? Yeah, right, between the full time day job side projects trying to keep things like like LinkedIn and other networking events involved, I simply have not prioritized it where I need to to be effective at it.
Aaron Moncur:Only so many things that you can do, right? All right. All right. Well, Andy, I think we'll, we'll wrap things up there. What a great conversation. Thank you again for for being on the show today. Any final thoughts that you'd like to leave us with?
Andy Thompson:I think kind of one thing I would like for engineers to understand, especially as we're talking about collaborative design, design for manufacturing, is, I think one of the keys there is identifying your manufacturing process early on, right When we when we start looking at a design, something like material selection plays a huge part in what we design. Are we going to use aluminum? Are we going to use steel? Right? If we're going to use aluminum, are we using 7075, or 6061, right? And those very granular definitions may not be available at the very beginning, but they should be, we should be able to categorize them very early on, right? We're going to design an aluminum structure, very different than a steel structure, right? So similarly, if you're going to design a machined part or a cast part, or a part made with additive manufacturing, right, the earlier you design that, or the earlier you you learn that that's your intended process, the sooner you can take advantage of those inherent pros in that process, in your design, right? If we've designed a good machine part for a machined process, right, we've optimized that design kind of right out of the gate, if we're taking a machined part and now we're going to cast it or we're going to try and build it through additive manufacturing. It's not just a plug and play scenario. So I like to help people understand that very early on. So as a final closing thought,
Aaron Moncur:thank you so much for sharing that. All right. Andy, how can, how can people get in touch with you? Yeah,
Andy Thompson:I mean, we've talked about LinkedIn pretty extensively. That's probably the most common way. As you said, I'm out there with kind of weekly posts. Try and engage with anyone who has questions, sends me messages, whatever it is. So that's probably the easiest way. That's the only version of social media that I find myself on beyond that. Now, let's just say, let's just say, stick with LinkedIn, because that's going to be the most successful way and happy to answer questions, engage with people, and help people you know, kind of learn about this, this powerful tool and the the the collaborative methodology that I like to try and bring to the table.
Aaron Moncur:Phenomenal. Andy, thank you so much for being on the show today, and thank you for everything you do for the engineering community.
Andy Thompson:Yeah, thank you, Aaron. This has been a whole lot of fun. Appreciate it.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering if you like. What you heard today. Please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
