Look, I have my engineering side as well. I think we all do. But one thing I hate about engineers is they have no practical experience. I remember many years ago we were pulling control wires in. The prints called for a 2in conduit and that is what was ran. According to the nec, x amount of wires could be pulled in there. The nec also specs no more then 360 degrees worth of bends, ya da ya da ya da. It was all designed within code and specs. However, I am here to tell you that you would have needed my diesel truck to pull that wire in there and when you did, you would have tore it all to shreds.
From that day forward, I never looked at what an engineer said as fact.
Years latter I was running this job and would bring up things like that on the prints. My boss pulled me aside and said look. do not tell them that. Install it correctly the first time and I am going to tell them we installed according to the prints and now it needs redone. A change order is the term they use.
Back then I thought wow that is messed up. Dishonest.
Now days, I am thinking if he would have threw me some extra money for saving and making him money, maybe I would just keep my mouth shut and live a happy life. I have built everything from schools, to renewable energy plants, to paper mills to gold mines, to re designing and automating WW2 presses used to make the metal parts of car seats to food plants and the challenges that go with that environment. I have worked on just about every machine in a machine shop, designed machines for the computer industry, and done massive paint and curing oven lines (fully automated) from the ground up.
What can I say, I have ADD and get bored and I am off to learn about something else. Everyone use electricity and so I met a bunch of people and learned a lot about.......everything.
When I was a child, I did not like playing with toys and so mom would cut the cord off an old non working electric can opener, radio or whatever and give me a box of tools and tell me to figure out how it works. I was 3.
So I do appreciate an engineers mind and find it very useful, I just told my wife yesterday, I wish I knew someone who liked to do math, because I am not going to sit around proving things with numbers. I build things, that is what I do. From my head into reality and no stopping off to argue about things for a month first. I run a few equations and numbers through my head and scribble them down and then I am off. Has that led to some not so great builds? Why yes it has, and unlike a classroom or wondering why it did not work because all the numbers say it should, I learned something. I learned that pulling x amount (I can not recall how many) #14 control wires through 200ft of 2in conduit is not going to work, no matter what the numbers say.
I have a couple months into the thought about a wind turbine and now it is just time to build. Enough thinking and more doing.
