How to be a qualified mechanical engineer? First of all, what a mechanical engineer needs is to master the peripheral knowledge and observation perspective that mechanical design needs to understand

1. Read the mechanical design manual skillfully

Some technical features of standard parts and common parts should be familiar with the heart. For example, it is necessary to know the use situation, usage mode and relevant technical characteristics of various bearings, belt drive, chain drive, gear transmission, screw drive, worm gear and so on. For the specific application, the selection calculation can be determined in accordance with the charts and formulas in the design manual.

2. Know n suppliers of common parts and read their product samples skillfully

Now the mechanical design tends to be modular, and the overall technical requirements for the mechanical equipment manufacturing plant are more focused on the assembly and application of some accessories and components. For example, Taiwan HIWIN, Japan THK, FAG, FESTO in Germany… To achieve this, you must know whether there are mature parts or parts that can meet the functional requirements of a certain part or part when you design a part or part or complete a certain action or function.

3. Familiar with the raw materials

For example, you should know that there are cold rolled or hot rolled iron plates and specifications and sizes of various profiles sold in the market. Experienced engineers will often know that the list you arrange for purchase will become completely different at the end.. Because in the steel market, there are generally thin, narrow and shorter situations. The purchased goods are often discounted with the relevant data selected in the design manual in your office.

4. Understand the structure principle and performance characteristics of various common machine tools in depth

So called the change cannot leave its ancestors, the machine tool is also so. The process of designing a machine can be compared to the children building blocks, one component by one, and then the components with different functions or components are connected with certain rules.

In this process, you need to master the functions and characteristics of some common mechanisms or devices. The structure or principle of the machine tools we used in turning, milling, drilling, planing, grinding and boring have been tested for more than a hundred years. We need not doubt the stability and applicability of the machine tools. For example, the lathe tool frame structure, chuck structure, the locking mechanism of the tail seat, the arrangement of the main shaft bearing, the sealing structure of the grinder spindle, the connecting rod mechanism of the planer, etc.

In fact, there are so many words to express. For these stable and common structures, we should learn to “l(fā)earn from” or “reference” when designing new machine tools. On the other hand, understanding the structure principle and performance characteristics of various common machine tools is the premise of drawing a part. For example, when you finish a drawing, you should at least know the general process of the part on the drawing.

This so-called general understanding of the owner of the building personally thinks it is like processing a common shaft parts, when you know some characteristics of lathe, milling machine, grinder, there will be no thread undercut, grinding wheel pass groove and other conditions on the drawings, and also will not mark tolerance requirements of IT6 and it7 on the length direction of shaft parts.

5. Have certain machine tool assembly ability

Many people will ask, it’s all the work of an assembler. As a designer, why do I know too much about this knowledge? Of course, those who will ask are usually newcomers.

When you never understand this knowledge, you will never understand the pain caused by the long assembly distance between the left and right bearing positions in your drawing when you are assembling a long shaft for transition or interference fitting, because the distance between the two bearing positions is too large and the bearing can only be assembled from left to right or from right to left.

Of course, you will not remember that when the shaft end thread is locked at last, it cannot be locked smoothly due to the lack of clamping plane on your drawing to limit the rotation of the shaft during locking. Of course, you can’t think of or understand which position, which holes or which pin positions need to be fixed during assembly.

6. Have a certain knowledge of electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, etc

Social division of labor is more and more detailed, and personal work direction is more and more specialized. Of course, the emphasis on these “collateral” disciplines does not require that a mechanical designer must be able to arrange the oil circuit of hydraulic or pneumatic manifold block or plan the strong current circuit or write the weak current program according to the function of the machine tool. But at least we should be able to understand the hydraulic system schematic diagram or electrical schematic diagram / wiring diagram provided by others, but it is more appropriate to read or write general PLC program or C program of some motion controller.

The main purpose of understanding these interdisciplinary knowledge is to be able to communicate and coordinate with professional hydraulic, pneumatic or electrical control engineers. Broadly speaking, when you have a thorough understanding of the hydraulic and electrical of this machine tool, you can make reasonable “reservation”. In the early stage of your design, you cross arrange the hydraulic and electrical lines and pipelines in your mind, so that you can fully consider the spatial location of these pipelines and pipelines.

7. Develop the ability to capture, discover, simplify, summarize and learn from life

For a person engaged in mechanical design, he should be better at discovering “moving” things and phenomena in his daily life. Let’s take some simple examples, such as the refrigerator. Even if you don’t know its refrigeration principle, we can observe and learn the sealing structure of the refrigerator door. Another example is the juicer, which uses the rotation of the cutterhead to cut materials, and also uses the centripetal force generated by the rotation of the cutterhead to filter and separate.

Another example is the rear wheel differential to figure out why there is a speed difference between the left and right wheels when the car turns.. All of these require us to capture, discover and ponder in our daily life, and then refine. Finally, we can learn from them in the design.

Of course, the best opportunity to learn and understand is in the machine tool exhibition, I believe many experienced design engineers have a deep understanding of this. Mechanical equipment exhibition is not only a good stage and opportunity for sales personnel to expand, but also a good opportunity for mechanical designers to learn from other people’s excellent design experience and recognize the current development situation of mechanical equipment. Therefore, the landlord hopes that the majority of peers should go to the relevant exhibitions more often and take more photos.

8. Knowledge of sheet metal

A good design work, should be let layman to watch, can let them make the first impression in mind “beautiful”, “advanced”, “firm”, “stable” judgment. Many mechanical design engineers often focus on the function of machine tools, efficiency, accuracy and other technical aspects. Often for machine tool sheet metal design, hydraulic pipeline and electrical circuit layout to take the attitude of neglect, neglect.

For a simple example, if we put the sheet metal cover on the Audi car, I believe a large proportion of customers can’t agree and accept it. Besides its perfect function and excellent computing speed, Apple’s “aesthetic” appearance design is also a big part of the reason why Apple’s mobile phones sell almost every person.

Having said so much, it is nothing more than highlighting the requirement of paying attention to the peripheral sheet metal design of the machine tool and the coordination of the layout of the lines and pipes or the color of the paint in the mechanical design. When you are not familiar with the bending parts of the pipe, you can often use the twist cutting equipment to cut the bending parts.

The purpose of mechanical design is how to realize complex problems with simple design, and how to let laymen see this design work with positive and commendatory attitude.

9. Knowledge of metal materials and heat treatment

The mastery of things or skills can be divided into such stages as cognition, slight knowledge, mastery and proficiency. As a mechanical design engineer, we are engaged in many interdisciplinary subjects in this industry.

The so-called professional, of course, our premise is to do a good job within the scope of our own design, and the knowledge of metal materials and heat treatment required here does not require you to memorize the phase diagram of iron carbon alloy and the metallographic morphology of various metals under different temperatures and heat treatment processes. But some basic knowledge still needs to be understood or mastered. For example, some common characteristics of low carbon steel, medium carbon steel, high carbon steel, common alloy steel, yield point, tensile strength of universal materials, hardness characteristics before and after heat treatment.

For a simple example, the workshop master asked you to help him get a more rigid deep hole boring bar for the lathe. When you heard that you wanted to get a thick, strong and high rigid thing, you wrote a 40gr in the material column of the drawing. After purchasing, processing and heat treatment, you found that YG6’s cutter grain copper welding could not reach the thick and strong cutter bar.

10. Designing software is just a tool, not the purpose of using it.

The building owner has interviewed many hot-blooded young people who have just graduated from some schools. Many of them have such and such certificates on their resumes, especially AutoCAD and Pro / E. A kind of intermediate cartographer, senior cartographer and so on. The landlord also added some QQ groups like SolidWorks application group. It is found that a lot of people are often immersed and intoxicated in discussing or studying what kind of modeling method to use, what kind of rendering or animation skills to use.

Of course, it’s not that it’s wrong for you to study and dig deeply into the functions of a certain software. It’s just that you think one’s learning ability and learning direction should be correctly grasped.

We do mechanical design to understand that the software is just a tool to replace the traditional drawing board and t-ruler. We should spend the main energy and time in the pure design idea, rather than let ourselves be bound by these huge software.