> Whenever some engineering problem needed "brains" the TV Lab
> ended up with it. I did a fan, too. They wanted to know why the
> fan motor was so noisy and hot... they were running the bloody
> iron saturated! I told them to put more turns on. I knew
> bugger-all about motors, so I treated it like a power
> transformer. It worked really well...

JT> Actually, increasing turns would probably make it worse unless
JT> it's the extra winding impedance you're relying on?

 I was relying on less flux density and hence less iron loss.

> Weren't you talking about an effective filter restricting airflow
> too much? Now you seem to be recommending a lousy filter.

JT> No, I didn't say anything about the filters. I only said (and
JT> implied) they used the SAME filters across their range of
JT> vacuums, just cranked up the power on the different models. The
JT> higher power models would suck the fine toner particles through
JT> the filter, killing the motor earlier.

 That's not how a filter works, John. They have a certain hole size,
so cranking up the motor can't suck more particles *larger* than that.
It sounds like you needed a finer filter.

 A vacuum cleaner uses paper as the filter, but the principle is the
same. If you want to trap fienr particles you don't achieve it by
using less suck... use a finer filter.

> The head makes an enormous difference to the way that the dirt is
> picked up. They stopped me before I could get right into it.

JT> Engineering costs too high? Geeze, and they sell the current
JT> crop of crap like they were designed by NASA scientists.

 At Pye, there were four labs: Test Equipment who were fiddlers,
Electrical who fucked everything they touched, Radio who just kept
making the same stuff all the time, and TV which made all the money
and *spent* all the money. It was nothing for me to spend six-months
getting a new deflection system perfected, or a new tuner, and when
they gave me the vacuum cleaner I was just getting settled in when
they took it off me. The other "chief" engineers (they all answered to
me anyway) had no idea that management was the true enemy. You had to
establish the mindset that what you did was incredibly difficult and
expensive, or they'd cut you to the bone.

 If you had a design *already* on the shelf, you quoted six months,
delivered in five, and they thought you were a genius. The secret was
to only commit to what you had already done. 

 To management only one thing matters... that when you put a design
into production, it works... or if not, you can fix it quick. They
don't give a shit how long it takes or what it costs. Production never
wants to change anyway, and Sales only wants to change when they can't
sell the shit Production is already making.

 If I were running NASA, we'd still be using the Saturn V... and the
fucker would *still* work!

Regards,
Bob


    

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