83-Year-Old Inventor Wins $40,000 3D Printing Competition

harrymcc writes "The Desktop Factory Competition was a contest to create an open-source design for a low-cost machine capable of turning cheap plastic pellets into the filament used by 3D printers, with a prize of $40,000. The winner is being announced today — and he was born during the Hoover administration. I interviewed 83-year-old retiree Hugh Lyman — a proud member of the maker movement — for a story over at TIME.com. From the article: 'Lyman describes himself as an “undergraduate engineer” — he studied engineering from 1948-1953 at the University of Utah, but didn’t earn a degree. Though he holds eight patents, he says he’s “not educated enough to be able to do calculations of torque and so forth.” So implementing his contest entry “was trial and error. I tinkered with it and used common sense.”'"

Comments

Re:Engineering isn't a secret club

[Registered Coward v2]

If he used common sense then he's obviously not a(n) design engineer.

There fixed it for you. He sounds like a real field engineer; someone who knows where to apply the 10 lb monkey wrench to fix the problem.

Re:Trial & Error Works When You Can Afford Err

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Accumulating the knowledge so you didn't need trial and error probably took a fair bit of trial and error to start out with though. :)

Re:Trial & Error Works

[Overzeetop]

I watched the jaw of a physicist hit the table in a design meeting where I claimed that I was confident in my engineering model to "single digit percent" errors. The director of engineering was pleased with the answer, and my friend asked me afterwards what I meant and how that could possibly be good. I told her that we only have a certain level of confidence in the materials and fabrication capability, and that the environmental loads were really just a guide - anything closer then 5-10% was probably wasting effort for no actual increase in performance.

This is an appropriate place for this quote:

"Structural engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess in such a way that the public at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." -Dr. A. R. Dykes