As somebody trying to get into mechanical engineering while living in a small urban apartment, this has been an incredible resource... not that I've made much progress along the lines it describes though.
It's tough to plan a path toward growth in these skills without sustaining inordinate expenses at each step. I can't afford to become afflicted with Gear Acquisition Syndrome. I've come close to dropping huge sums of cash on tools before discovering, at the last minute, critical reasons that they could not do what I need for the designs I have in mind. Maybe I'll visit a makerspace? Ah, but every one in my area appears to have gone defunct since Covid year zero.
So the journey up to this point has been:
- A lot of reading: not just faffing around with hobbyist blogspam -- full-on MechE textbooks, learning what really goes into engineering schematic diagrams, all that good stuff
- Getting back up to speed with the pencil-on-paper geometry and math skills I've lost after years of doing all my intellectual work in digital form (at least I can still draw a freehand circle)
- Proto-proto-prototyping: just making some physical objects roughly of the same geometry as what I've designed -- whittling them out of wood, sculpting them out of polymer clay
- Hacking together janky tools: trying to make a crappy mini lathe out of Meccano-clone parts, trying to make a crappy mini lathe out of an electric drill, just to get a basic feel for what's involved
- Apologizing to my wife for all this weird scary stuff in the corner of the apartment
I was a CS major. The only hands-on physical engineering I did in college was cooking a single-transistor chip in a freshman applied physics lab. Basically I feel like someone who has studied everything about the physics of bicycles but has never ridden one. I'm really struggling on how to proceed.
It's tough to plan a path toward growth in these skills without sustaining inordinate expenses at each step. I can't afford to become afflicted with Gear Acquisition Syndrome. I've come close to dropping huge sums of cash on tools before discovering, at the last minute, critical reasons that they could not do what I need for the designs I have in mind. Maybe I'll visit a makerspace? Ah, but every one in my area appears to have gone defunct since Covid year zero.
So the journey up to this point has been:
- A lot of reading: not just faffing around with hobbyist blogspam -- full-on MechE textbooks, learning what really goes into engineering schematic diagrams, all that good stuff
- Getting back up to speed with the pencil-on-paper geometry and math skills I've lost after years of doing all my intellectual work in digital form (at least I can still draw a freehand circle)
- Proto-proto-prototyping: just making some physical objects roughly of the same geometry as what I've designed -- whittling them out of wood, sculpting them out of polymer clay
- Hacking together janky tools: trying to make a crappy mini lathe out of Meccano-clone parts, trying to make a crappy mini lathe out of an electric drill, just to get a basic feel for what's involved
- Apologizing to my wife for all this weird scary stuff in the corner of the apartment
I was a CS major. The only hands-on physical engineering I did in college was cooking a single-transistor chip in a freshman applied physics lab. Basically I feel like someone who has studied everything about the physics of bicycles but has never ridden one. I'm really struggling on how to proceed.