Frugal Engineering

About forty years ago it used to be called "value engineering."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

No, just my possibly rusty memory.

I always thought they called it KISS.

Yesterday I was in a department store buy some jeans, which were on sale. While wandering around I noticed a kiosk of men's gifts and saw something I thought would make a great Christmas gift for my son. So I reached for the pen in my shirt pocket, but as I did so I realized I didn't have any paper to write on. Hmmm.

Then I remembered that the iphone I bought a few months ago has a 'notes' app. So I took out my iphone and typed a note to myself to check for that item on-line to see if I could get a better price than the department store price.

Now all I need to do is find my pad of post-it notes, so I can leave myself a note on my computer monitor to remind myself to check the notes on my phone. Now, where did I put that pen...

Better than that, just aim the camera and an app finds it on the web for you!

there are a lot of interesting tidbits on the Apollo missions, Silly Putty is one of them.

Fiction? Pah!

I'd think pencils wouldn't be a good idea in a weightless environment. All that carbon dust floating around might short something out.

Frugal engineering is not value engineering or any other versions of cost reduction endevours. They are similar in concept but not in the environment in which it is performed and the far-reaching impacts.

Value engineering and other lean production techniques are implemented to improve quality and reduce cost in an established manufucturing sites targeting a developed market. Frugal engineering is performed in a makeshift manufacturing site out of necessity in an emerging market where doing it any other way would not work.

Value engineering is the improvement of what already exists whereas frugal engineering is the creation of what previously did not exist and would otherwise be impossible.

VE is frugality but FE is improvisational.

There are two kinds of value engineering. One is as has been explained, to lessen the cost of an existing product and hopefully improve quality.

The other kind of value engineering I've run across is to take an established product and fiddle with the engineering so that the end user HAS to purchase parts from the OEM. I've run across this with sophisticated woodworking machinery where the old established OEM thinks they have the world by the azz. They started to make "improvements" to their machine like using custom electric motors for the cutterheads that they manufacture. They even manufactured their own transport chain that carried the wood through the cutterheads.

This kind of value engineering increases the value, all right...to the manufacturer, to the detriment of the customer. As soon as I realized what they were doing, they got tossed off of my purchase list.

Maybe there will be others who colour me a cynic, but "value engineering" to me means that the manufacturer is trying to cheapen up the product to make more profit.

"Frugal Engineering", to me, is where the manufacturer is trying to cheapen up his manufacturing equipment to make a product. Big difference. For example, I rarely purchased new electric motors when I needed motors in the 100-300 hp range for a new plant application. Good used motors are so plentiful and the paybacks of power savings so poor that I could equip a line with used motors and be money ahead for at least 10 years. Saved us a ton of money and we laughed ourselves silly when the efficiency wonks had rectal hemorrhages.

Jon.

Potayto, potahto.

Are ya somehow related to Dan "Potatoehead" Quail?

I worked in a Computer parts Warehouse one Summer,they were going to re locate and the upper Management were looking at Storage Solutions for the New site.The Guy in charge was very impressed with a vertical carousel system he had seen and had a Brainwave.He spent £38,000 on getting people to design a Horizontal Carousel which was an ongoing project until i mentioned i could save them Thousands and boost picking speeds on floor level.Intrigued i was asked how this would be achieved . . . Shelves,i should have billed them for consultancy fees.

There is enough "urban myth" to support almost any story about recording instruments in space. However, it appears that the Fisher Space Pen was developed with private funds and was ultimately used bu NASA on manned space missions. Pencils appear to have been the approach used by the cosmonauts.

The story I heard was this: The Americans invested quite a substantial ammount of money toward making a pen that would work in space.....and it was the Russians who just used a pencil.

I too heard the same story that, the Americans invested considerably on R& D to demonstrate a ball point pen workable on space & the Russians did it with a mere pencil

The pen and pencil in space thing seems silly on the surface but there's a lot more to it. The majority of people think only about the writing aspect in which case a simple pencil would do just fine. If your a good designer/engineer, you cannot stop there. You need to consider everything. This is a good example of how one group of designers or engineers think compared to another and it has a lot to do with culture and not "Frugal Engineering"

Consider the pencil used in space...

-a broken tip implies a small foreign object, nearly invisible, is now floating around in zero gravity and can potentially be inhaled.

-Risk to personnel

-a broken tip means you need to sharpen it again. How do you sharpen a pencil without generating more debris?...This means you now have to deal with the shavings.

Now consider the pen used in space...

-no broken tips

-no risk to personnel

-no debris generated

-no debris management necessary

Seems like a no brainer to go with the pen. No?

So...you can call the Russian's approach as "Frugal Engineering" but it is far from that. It's merely a case of ignoring "risk analysis". Russian engineers were notorious for that at the time. I'm sure someone will give me flack for that. Anyway, just Google "Russian aircraft safety record". It's dismal to say the least...

So...everyone laughs at the implied complexity of a nitrogen pressurized ink cartridge compared to the function of a simple pencil but...think about the thinking that went into it!

My take on it? "Frugal Engineering" is often (but not always...) "Hack Engineering"

My $.02

I'll add a GA to this one. I agree that we may, too often, laugh before we think through the ramifications. I think, sadly, that we may buy into the peer-pressure that drives a valid argument into the waste-bin, without ever knowing the cost. And we may even lose the services of the thinker who had the idea in the first place, if we discourage/disparage them enough!

The real point of this story is that sometimes we get stuck on making one idea work, despite its problems, and fail to consider alternatives. And then there is a side characteristic of engineers, which is to get so excited by meeting a challenge that they will run and run with an idea even to absurdity. I know I've been guilty of it too.

"so excited by meeting a challenge that they will run and run with an idea"

Happened to a team of which I was the leader in a college course on system's acquisition. We techies were stuck on an "insoluble" problem, when a budget weenie (absolutely no knowledge of engineering) solved our problem precisely BECAUSE she wasn't an engineer or tech, and didn't think like us.

I can't even remember the problem or the solution, but I'll never forget the lesson she taught us all that day.