So I thought I'd post about how my work is going down here, since I haven't done that for a good while.
Work is great! It was definitely the right decision to move down here for the job. The experience I'm gaining just can't be compared. I've been designing tooling and then going down to the shop and talking with the personal down there about how it will be formed, what problems they might have. Then watching as it's being made and used.
All of last week I was working overtime and starting work at 6am. Those 5am morning were definitely a little rough but it was worth it. We are getting our plane ready to flight test and as such we have a massive computer control center in the back of the plane that basically records everything that is going on while the plane is flying. We've got over 50 different parameters that we will be reading. They go from about 24 thermocouples for measuring temperatures at various spots around the engine compartment, to pressure readings in the exhaust, to prop RPM and turbine RPM, to position of the flight controls such as elevator and ailerons. We measure outside air temp, outside pressure, stall warning signal, even the force it takes to pull back on the control stick.
So as such, I was in early all last week helping to calibrate them all. That is making sure that they are reading correctly and everything is working fine. It's one of those jobs that goes really easy...until something goes wrong. When something isn't reading right, the troubleshooting begins. And in some cases that took days trying to figure out where the problem is, checking all the wiring diagrams, checking the actual wiring, checking the instrument. And when you have 100's of wires all coming out of the back of the computer...it's a mess. But we are almost ready to start flight testing!!
Today was my first DCR wednesday. DCR stands for Drawing Change Request. Basically these are made when somewhere down the line after we have finished our drawings, somebody noticed a problem. It could be that the vendor we specified on the drawing changed names or went out of business. Or it could be that a specification for the type of material has been outdated and a new one needs to be specified. Or it could just be that we missed something in the design and when they actually went to put it together..things didn't fit, and they have a solution.
Well I guess the DCR's have been piling up, with everyone too busy with our projects to get to them. So we had official DCR wednesday where we would all plough through them and get them done. Well there was 186 of them, spanning back 2 years!!!!
So it was actually pretty fun. Basically like a big treasure hunt. You start out reading through it, figuring out what the problem is. Then you go and hunt down the original drawings to see how everything fits together. Then we hunt down the person who wrote the DCR and do a little detective work figuring out why it was made, if it is 'really' needed, how this change will affect the parts around it....and on. And then we decide if this change really is necessary and if so we start the business of making the proper revisions.
Well I could write a couple more long paragraphs of some of the DCR's I ran into, and the treasure hunt it led me on, and the problems it created. Suffice to say I was pulling up old drawings from the 80's and had over 48 sq ft of drawings I was looking over. And then to top it off, I had to find an old digital copy that was stored away on a floppy disk and had to be booted on this old computer that had a copy of 'VERSA CAD' which booted from DOS!! It was craziness!!!
So a totally fun day and a great learning experience hunting down all this info and trouble shooting and making decisions as to whether this is truly necessary!
Tada! Now to bed for another day of work!
Logan
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