Johnny Elbows on :
I was quite interested in your conclusions when talking about how thoroughly things are tested by physical engineers. My experience in that field showed that the actual way of designing/testing things is actually quite different from the way that you guys envision.
I used to work as a machinist. My job was to make bits for lathes, and to help with machining molds for injection molding. Usually the way the design worked was that engineers would calculate the stresses that they expected to see, and then they would double that number to get the amount of stress that the mold/bit had to handle. They doubled the number to handle "stupid people," and then they added 10% to the number "just in case."
So, while they had sophisticated software and mathematical models to calculate the stress, most of the strength came from handling "stupid people" and from the "just in case" fudge factor.
I used to work as a machinist. My job was to make bits for lathes, and to help with machining molds for injection molding. Usually the way the design worked was that engineers would calculate the stresses that they expected to see, and then they would double that number to get the amount of stress that the mold/bit had to handle. They doubled the number to handle "stupid people," and then they added 10% to the number "just in case."
So, while they had sophisticated software and mathematical models to calculate the stress, most of the strength came from handling "stupid people" and from the "just in case" fudge factor.
