Bad Engineering

[Bill, KD0HG]

Forwarding these examples on. Good laff. #3 is the winner.

[KA0HCP]

Those are obviously urinals for sailors who can unbutton either side of the trouser flap!

[W2PFY]

That last one is good for the split pee syndrome

Know what I mean Bert??

[Ralph W3GL]

    Funny.......

[Opcom]

what were they thinking with these designs? the last one - pee partners. something to be avoided for certain. the design was possibly marketed as a way to help keep the urinals cleaner. works when no one wants to use them.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

More like a bad architect or bad builder. No engineering involved.  

[W3SLK]

They must have borrowed our engineers from work 

[k4kyv]

I have seen many things, including radio equipment with comparable design.  Like a toggle switch whose handle is blocked when an adjacent rotary switch is set to a certain position. I have done the same thing myself: cut out a hole in a chassis and then discover that the transformer I wanted to install wouldn't fit because something was in the way of one terminal, or else there wasn't room to connect a wire to it. Or find that a tube with plate or grid cap would fit nicely into a cramped space, but realise there was no way to connect or disconnect to the cap because there wasn't enough room for the connector to clear the cap when it was taken off.

Another example was with a brand new high school they built a few years ago near here.  The classrooms were rectangular, somewhat  long and narrow. The teacher's desk, white board, computer and controls for all the A-V equipment were located at one end.  They installed a screen and projection monitor in each  room.  You guessed it.  That screen was placed at the opposite end of the classroom.  The chairs had to be arranged sideways so the kids had to turn 90° to one side to see the teacher and board, and then turn 180° to the other direction to see the screen.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Reminds me of my time in gov't. On more than one occasion, someone's great idea ended up being a debacle, but for whatever reason - it went ahead anyhow. Some were true head scratchers, though I'm not sure any were quite as amusing as these.

[Carl WA1KPD]

I say Photo Shop.

In the RR picture the shadows are missing in some places. For example the tree shadows on the left side do not follow all the way.

The house one makes no sense. No builder would invest in something to sell that has angles that do not allow the vehicle to get onto the driveway and then into the garage without hanging up.

Tjhe urinal one might be real to meet a state or federal mandate for the size of the establishment, but then the BI would have had to sign off on it for the CO.

Funny- but doubtfull

 

[k4kyv]

I say Photo Shop.

In the RR picture the shadows are missing in some places. For example the tree shadows on the left side do not follow all the way.

I didn't notice anything wrong with the tree shadow; that could just be the shape of the tree limbs, but you will notice that the right handrail casts a shadow on the wall but the left one doesn't. Also, the shadow under the porch is at a different angle on the right side than on the left.  Assuming that it is the sun that is generating the light, the shadow angles should be the same on both sides, since sun rays striking the earth are very nearly parallel.

Besides, if the train track was still in use, the porch would have been knocked down long ago, probably before the concrete had time to set.  If the track was abandoned, weeds and grass would be growing up through it.

[W3SLK]

It still bemoans of typical engineering practice, (with exception to all the EE's on board  ). At work a person will implement a scheme because they seem hell bent on making it fail. We ran an reverese osmosis filter backwards for 5 years because the CE said this is the way it was done. The would continue to blow seals and 1000psi rupture disc. It wasn't until this person left that our maintenance staff convinced operations of the error. It hasn't blown since and runs rather quiet now to boot. But a perfect example of wasted government money is the city of Sunbury, PA just re-did a traffic intersection complete with new sidewalks that followed the regs of the 'Americans with Disabilities Act'. But since they were given 'stimulus monies', those new sidewalks were tore out and new ones re-poured that were identical to the ones that were in there. Just because they had the money to spend!

[KB2WIG]

 " But since they were given 'stimulus monies', those new sidewalks were tore out and new ones re-poured that were identical to the ones that were in there. Just because they had the money to spend! "

whos brudder or sister in law owns the mud shop??


klc

[Opcom]

There is some engineering involved, but the intentional waste of resources always makes engineering worse. Dallas is building a 'city park' complete with trees etc, right over an 8-lane highway that cuts across downtown. The cost is obscene. Another idiotic project is some kind of festivities area in the Trinity river flood plain, including a toll road and a bad copy of the St Louis Arch. The Army corps of engineers advised against driving foundations and piers into the flood plain there because the whole thing is built on sand down deep below, and once the water gets in besides the new piers, it can find its way under the levee, and literally come up through the topsoil and flood downtown. Furthermore Dallas is too broke to hire more police not to mention repair the FLIR on the helicopters, er.. that is the one helicopter that still has not been grounded and to keep the libraries swimming pools open yet still does these foolish projects. The more money is involved, the more ways will be found to spend it on assinine things.

[N0WEK]

One way to fix the "urinal problem"!

http://www.radioactivepanda.com/comic/70

[w1vtp]

I say Photo Shop.

In the RR picture the shadows are missing in some places. For example the tree shadows on the left side do not follow all the way.

The house one makes no sense. No builder would invest in something to sell that has angles that do not allow the vehicle to get onto the driveway and then into the garage without hanging up.

Tjhe urinal one might be real to meet a state or federal mandate for the size of the establishment, but then the BI would have had to sign off on it for the CO.

Funny- but doubtfull

 

Yup Photoshop or equiv

[w1vtp]

I have seen many things, including radio equipment with comparable design.  Like a toggle switch whose handle is blocked when an adjacent rotary switch is set to a certain position.<snip>

HP 8640 had a switch in the back that was misplaced.  If you picked up the sig gen up with the left hand supporting the rear it was easy to hit the int / ext time base switch.  It if gets put in the ext pos, which I seem to recall was up, the display quits.  I have had many trips out to the field the discover this snafu.

Made for some easy fixes   

Al

[WA1GFZ]

Al,
One of my cleanest 8640Bs has the reference switch wired backwards.
Go figgure $100 on ebay and came with a dead display. Just for the heck of it I flipped the switch and it came to life. Maybe somebody tightened it and rotated the switch around.

[WB2EMS]

I was once a manufacturing engineer at a company that designed all manner of analog filter boards, with sub modules like preamps that could be added to the board. Being analog, all the boards had trim pots for DC offset and the like. The problem was that they designed the boards with the trim pots placed 'blind' against other assemblies - you couldn't access the pot. This led to such idiocies as putting the entire board in an oven to heat soak, then whip the door open, pull the card out, yank the daughtercard off, tweak the pot 1/4 turn, slam it back onto the card, slap the card back in the oven trying to maintain temperature and see if you made things better or worse or just disturbed the temperature too much to tell. Wait 5 minutes, rinse and repeat.

The amount of human frustration with the assemblies was staggering, as was the wasted time. As ME, I kept lobbying for a redesign with the engineering group until I was told point blank by the owner to cut it out, he didn't want them 'wasting' time fixing it. The manufacturing manager and I figured that anytime a Japanese company wanted that part of the market, they could have it just by designing the boards for real manufacturing.

In terms of wasteful government spending, the local craze here is 'traffic calming'. This is the tactic of taking your tax money once to build a road, then taking it again to put impediments in the road to keep you from using it. Lately these have been costly raised speed bump pedestrian crossings, or in some places just blocking the road entirely to traffic. The speed bumps make reasonable launching ramps on a good motorcycle. Whenever I see Traffic Calming signs, I'm tempted to add "Driver Enraging" with a magic marker. 

Our little Politically Correct city seems determined to get rid of cars. Traffic calming, taking away the street parking, or making it terribly expensive, weird hours, local taxes. Then they wonder why we just click on the web and have UPS deliver it to our door instead of going downtown shopping.

I hope the pendulum swing back towards normal soon....

[Ed/KB1HYS]

It seems that individual people can be pretty smart, but groups tend to divide the available brain power...

Feature Creep is a good example.  Some folks keep adding to the design until it just plain doesn't work right.  Ever see Pentagon Wars?

[W3SLK]

A camel was a horse put together by a committee 

[WB2EMS]

"A committee is a life form with 6 or more legs, and no brain" - Lazarus Long/RAH   

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Committees - none of us is as stupid as all of us.

[Opcom]

I have seen many things, including radio equipment with comparable design.  Like a toggle switch whose handle is blocked when an adjacent rotary switch is set to a certain position.<snip>

HP 8640 had a switch in the back that was misplaced.  If you picked up the sig gen up with the left hand supporting the rear it was easy to hit the int / ext time base switch.  It if gets put in the ext pos, which I seem to recall was up, the display quits.  I have had many trips out to the field the discover this snafu.

Made for some easy fixes   

Al

That was my $25 8640 right there. "it's broken, just good for parts" he said. I actually started taking it apart to check the power supply before I noticed the switch.