If you liked this, you'd probably also enjoy this video[1] where a guy tests cryogenically frozen drill bits and explains (and shows via microscope) why they are so much stronger.
Looking at broken parts under a scanning electron microscope is common. I saw that decades ago in a hydraulics R&D facility. They had devices in life cycle tests (the largest being a locomotive transmission) and when a part broke, it was looked at in detail to understand why. Heat treatment failure? Machining error? Weak point in the design?
That's why he did it, he's not claiming it's a novel technique; what's not common is it being accessible to the hobbyist. Of course, it doesn't really matter, as he says at the end there's nothing really to be done with this information, but it is cool.
Clough42 is one of my favourite channels, always look forward to his reliably weekly video. Great mix of machining (metal), 3D printing, and electronics - CAD too which many don't show (and at just the right speed IMO, doesn't belabour it, but his narration of key presses basically taught me Fusion360, always in my head when I use it myself).
I have picked up most of my (somewhat limited!) Fusion360 skills by watching James' weekly videos!
Absolutely. I think I tried it before I watched his videos, but didn't really know what I was doing or spend time on it. I'm no whiz but I can make things now, and I'm always hearing 'hit x for construction' etc. in my head, guiding me through it!
Of course there are loads of (perhaps better even) F360 tutorial videos on Youtube, but the nice thing about his is that it's just part of it - I actually haven't seen anyone else design & make - and it's entertaining, even if you don't want to learn or already know, he just treats it like any other thing he's doing.
Wow this is seriously amazing, makes me I wish I had studied mechanical engineering instead of CS. I really admire this guy's self-studying though ;I also like to think of myself as an autodidact but this guy seems to have some serious focus. I wish I could meet more people like him in real life.
Anyway, I just subscribed.
I have a MSc in MechE. Unfortunately a lot of the stuff he does is the “fun stuff” and like any engineering job, you’re lucky if you have a 50/50 fun stuff to paper work ratio.
Materials science is more focused on these topics than mechanical engineering fwiw
MSE used to be part of ME (still is in some universities).
I had a materials science course as part of my ME undergrad. (And of course there was overlap in other courses.)
When I went to grad school for a Master's at an engineering school which, at the time, was small enough to not actually have formal departments, I studied a fair bit of mechanical engineering but actually did a materials science thesis.
In Sweden, at many places that do a materials science engineering degree, it is historically under "Mining engineering" rather than "machine engineering".
True! Even my diploma in ME course has a subset of MatSci in it. Fascinating stuff.
I studied both CS and Mech Eng (double major). Totally worth the extra work!
I'm a High Schooler right now (pretty competent software, interested in hardware). If you dont mind me asking, what specifically has your double major opened up for you?
I can’t speak for the person you replied to, but I work for a software company that is always on the lookout for mechanical engineers who can write code. It’s a pretty rare combination.
It's true, you might be able to find a slow career move where your roles take on more and more code until eventually pure programming rolls trust your experience. However if you're looking for a faster move look into night classes, if possible. You can get a computer science degree for much cheaper in a couple years of just doing night classes along with your work. It can be hard to balance all that but career changes are usually difficult to navigate. I wish you luck!
PLC pays well - and often there are contracting/consulting opportunities - look for jobs in the Automotive area.
Warning: wall of text follows!
Tldr; it's a lot of coursework but I've never regretted it.
I'm a TPM now, have worked on aerospace projects with small teams where it helps to be fluent in both sides of the electronics and mechanical design. I've managed multi disciplinary design optimization efforts where there is heavy intersection between code and real-world mechanical factors (writing code for my mechanical designs and writing the backbone for other contributors or translating their system to code). Being able to understand electric motor systems design end to end through the entire chain from control comms to firmware to MOSFETs, electromagnetics, and mechanics has been rewarding for me as well.
In terms of opening opportunities, small hardware startups are where I've been able to have impact, and where there is demand for someone who wants to contribute in both areas. Where I am now as TPM is a fairly limited track and PM is a bad word in some companies. At faang, it seems that software track pays better than tpm or mechanical so that is one item to note.
At larger companies it is a difficult sell for someone who wants to do both at the same time as an IC. Smaller niche companies are more likely to want someone who has the breadth and can help fill in gaps or own a whole project.
The reason I am not a pure SWE is that my passion lies in being able to hold the result in my hands at the end of the day (or week, month, year:)
I'd recommend you try out the machine shop or what is available to you if you go to an engineering college, maybe some robotics projects, mechanical engineering foundation courses, material science courses. See how you like it. I'm sure you will be successful whatever you do. If you do both it's a lot of work but I never regretted it for a second.
I was at lockheed and am still friends with some of the best engineers I have ever worked with ; Every single HW engineer I worked with also coded - and we have built, patented and pursued so many other paths based on the capabilities of HW engineers being able to design actual HW as well as spec the code required to solve the problem.
So, if you have the capability, certainly go both... It will give you, at your age, the ability to build the change you want to see in the world....
Your lifetime earnings as a MechE are probably only 20% of what you'd earn studying CS - especially at the high end of ability.
You could just take some of those extra earnings and take up MechE as a hobby.
>> MechE are probably only 20% of what you'd earn studying CS
Maybe if you are a MechE working for facebook or twitter. But go to something like SpaceX or BMW and you will find the best MechEs paid way more than the software people. The insane paychecks in CS only exist at companies where software is the final product. Companies that produce physical products put CS into a support role. A department head at Boeing or LM is far more likely to be from an engineering background.
Sorry but this is such an HN comment. It manages to simultaneously make everything about money, basically position things in the context of Big Tech, and assume that your specific undergraduate degree charts your career.
For the record, I have an ME undergrad (and a grad degree that's basically material science) and while I've mostly only used my direct classwork a bit, I've done fine.
20% is probably a bit of an exaggeration. I wor in tech and worked in the regular industry prior. I would say my wage is about 20-30% less than my peers of the same level. I don't know anyone that works for a company that has a payband difference more than one sigma for each IC level.
This is basically a drop in to Facebook or Google and make $600K/year or life isn't worth living sort of comment. (And I doubt if it's even accurate as someone with non-CS degrees.)
And the idea that basically any other engineering major will make 20% of an even remotely typical CS major is idiocy.
The claim was you'd make 1/5th. Which may have been a wording mistake. I'd believe maybe 20% less in general--which may very well be fine for many people if that's their preference.
Then you'd just be a dilettante.
Not much wrong with that, as long as your family is fed. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering. Most every dollar I've earned was from computers. I still faff around doing enjoyable hobby projects in engineering (ultra-light ME, EE, CS) with the kids. It's a fine life.
I prefer the word amateur, which shares the same root as "love" for a reason.
I didn't know the backscatter could be analyzed to show atomic element composition!
it was one of those random, oh, this is how i learned about XYZ moment for me as well. yes, as he states in the video, i could also have read the wikipedia page (and at some point i probably still will), but his explanation went into so much new information for me that it was filled with so many "hmm, never really thought about that to even consider how it worked", but here's the info in a youtube video so now i just have answers to questions i didn't know i had
Rutherford scattering (backscattering) is proportional to atomic number. Heavier (more protons) atoms scatter more.
I saw that and I was like hmm. Scanning electron microscopes have sure advanced a lot since I was a grad student.
What's most amazing about this video is that he was able to get an electron microscope for $3.
I like this dude and subscribe to his channel. It's my hope that my next move will land me in a spot with enough space to build a home workshop. It seems like a great hobby.
The call to action in the video (forced reason for viewers to leave a comment or otherwise engage to boost metrics) is cringeworthy at this point. Stop doing it. We all know what you are doing and it makes you seem unprofessional.
don't hate the player, hate the game.
I hate the game, and there are plenty of players who are successful without insulting the intelligence of viewers by thinking that adding some forced prompt into the video and nonchalantly remarking 'let me know in the comments' is going to fly past us as we all pause the video to give our opinion on whether you should use a drill to expand a pilot hole or not.
If you like learning how things work, like to learn lots of things and want a good subject to motivate you, restore an older car to perfect working order. You will be investigating mechanics, electronics, chemistry, metal working, even upholstery. Hell, I got into 3D printing too since some of the older plastic parts simply aren’t made anymore.
And at the end of it, you get a sweet perfect vintage car to show for all your learning.
And my personal corollary: R/C cars when I was a kid. I learned so many useful things from building, driving, breaking, and fixing them!
DC electronics, motors, suspension tuning and theory, PWM, basic mechanical “instincts”, soldering, how transmissions work (some models had even fluid-filled torque converters on them) differential gearing (and some had limited slip!) and even regenerative braking.
Years later I’d constantly be surprised how all of these things worked almost the same way in real cars.
Ha! I started on flight sim, made it to rc planes, and the first day of flight instruction, I told the instructor and he said: “if you can fly rc, you can fly full scale.” All I had to master was emergency procedures and some theory on the throttle vs pitch and I was off to the skies!
I’d imagine the stakes are a little higher when you're on the plane looking down than when you're on the ground looking up?
The rest makes sense. Controls are in different places, everything is bigger, but the basics are the same.
Is the bigger plane easier in the sense it is less twitchy?
I’ve tried a couple of RC helicopters and the larger one was much easier to handle.
Yeah, flying a plane is "easy". It's the taking off and landing that gets tricky. /s
Meta: there are lots of video posts tagged "[video] (youtube)", which is redundant, and gives no information beyond that it's a video. Could that second half mention the YouTube channel that's being referenced? That would be the equivalent of most website references. Perhaps "[video] (youtube.com/@Clough42)"?
The purpose of that label is to warn people who don’t want video. Anyone who wants the additional metadata can get it by clicking the link.
It only seems redundant in this case because YouTube is well known for only serving videos. If you look at other articles you will see that it is a system that identifies the doc-type and the host name for the article. Your might also see [video](bbc.co.uk) in which case there is no redundancy.
You will see a lot of articles marked [PDF](somesite.com) indicating that the doctype is PDF rather and the default html page. There may be other doc types like that but those are the most common. I have not notice a list of possible values anywhere.
that's doesn't seem like a bad idea to me, but how would that be different than having the author's name attached to all submissions? we see wsj.com, nyt.com, etc all the time with no other metadata.
i get the label for [PDF] and what not, but does anyone think a link to youtube.com is NOT going to be a video?
Reminds me of when I was a kid and a car part broke on the family car. I don't remember if the warranty or insurance didn't want to pay, but being an engineer and knowing a few people with tools he got a whole report that said the part was defective due to x, y, and z and got the damage fixed.
[dead]
Takeaways:
- It makes the drills harder, but as a result likely also more brittle, so they may only be "stronger" for certain applications
- Using the bit properly is much more important than what it's made of/whether it's cryo treated - he got an entire plate of steel with one bit with 30 m/min (and the bit was still good at the end) and then destroyed 7 bits, included some treated ones, on fewer holes than that using 40 m/min (I assume that's surface speed).
- This also means he didn't test how much longer the bit would last under good conditions, only that it was able to withstand non-optimal conditions longer. While it's likely that this transfers, it's not guaranteed.
Applied Science is an amazing channel. I'd also recommend checking out Breaking Taps and Alpha Phoenix for similar content.
That dude has a $50,000 oscilloscope.
Probably the least interesting piece of equipment he has. Anyways, at his latest video he has pretty pedestrian scope (~$2k) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO_EHceV9sk so any fancy scopes might have been just loaners from $work.
How are these 360 degrees test setups called, that use two current probes to determinate the electric resistance in an object from point to point?
That could have been interesting non-destructive scan with microfractured elements like this drill. They had them at uni. They had a third wire to ground after the test and some strange holding grip to prevent the whole setup from becoming a capacitor. One run took hours and you needed the 3d model of the object and thorough cleaning and sometimes sanding of the surface.
His YouTube revenue could have payed for the scope. I found it
https://alltest.net/categories/products/MSO58-Tektronix
Which he probably got at salvage and repaired.