The company had hired an engineer for a microwave project and the fellow dug into the work with energy and gusto. He seemed genuinely happy, until......
The planned design was going to need some stripline structures, but an examination of several circuit boards convinced this engineer that the available geometric precision of circuit board artwork at that company was inadequate for the purpose at hand. Therefore, he brought in from home an utterly exquisite set of precision carving knives and working by hand, he actually carved the required stripline structures out of raw copperclad circuit boards without ever etching them.
His stripline carvings were wonders to behold. Engineer after engineer, upon seeing them, walked away awestruck.
I must pause to stress the caliber of this man's work. I would without hesitation compare him to Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo and I am not being the least bit hyperbolic about that comparison. That kind of skill simply does not come along very often.
The housings for these stripline structures were to be made of hollowed-out aluminum blocks which needed to be fastened together with lots of screws spaced at very close intervals to avoid creating slot antennas at the blocks' interfaces. This is a commonly known microwave requirement, a standard practice in the microwave industry, but it was rejected by the department manager in the avowed interest of cost savings.
According to this manager, the blocks only needed to be fastened with four screws, one in each corner and at the manager's orders, that's exactly how the blocks were made.
When the resulting assemblies didn't work, the manager blamed the engineer who then quit and was never heard from again.
The project itself was never completed. Small wonder.
Love it when bean counters get priority over physics. :>P
I have a similar story. Years ago I was working on a project to detect radar signals. My team was building a signal switch (due to many radar frequencies in use) and we were pushing 1 GHz (which was cutting edge at the time). We found that only high quality PIN diodes could reliably pass the high frequencies. But a purchasing manager balked at their cost, and insisted that we use common rectifier diodes instead because they were much cheaper and "a diode is a diode". When we protested that the laws of physics wouldn’t allow that substitution, he replied “if you’re such good engineers you can make it work anyway.”
That kind of logic eventually bankrupted the company.
Posted by: ferd | June 22, 2011 at 11:15 AM