Devices that we depend on every day can be reduced to uselessness by something as small as a single speck of dust in the manufacturing plant. The satellites that orbit far above our heads, the hard drives in our computers, and the medical devices that keep hearts beating and administer life-saving drugs are all assembled…
Nearly everything we eat, wear, or place in our homes moves on a pallet. Lifting those pallets are ANSI B56.1-1969 standard powered industrial trucks—better known as forklifts. If you buy a product in a store, it has been moved by a forklift at some point. The everyday operation of warehouses, distribution centers, and, indeed, the…
We’re all familiar with the old television trope of characters not being able to pay for a meal. The friend who promised to pay for dinner dashes out, and the remaining person finds their wallet empty or has their credit card declined. Cut to the character up to their elbows in sudsy water, washing dishes…
A lot happens in a day at the factory. Noise levels rise and fall. Temperatures climb and plummet. Shifting vibrations rattle and roll through the building and everything in it. Workers come and go, some passing tools between them and using them with different amounts of force. Tools can drop, or get mucked, or misused.…
From protecting our military service personnel to locating victims of natural disasters, drones make our most dangerous jobs safer. They’re endlessly versatile, and people are finding new ways to use drones all the time. That’s why the use of drones continues to expand to many new sectors of society, and their popularity is only expected…
In refrigeration, you don’t actually cool a room, refrigerator, or freezer. Instead, you pump the heat out, and doing so requires an arrangement of tubing, blowers, compressors, and evaporators all connected with fittings. If a fitting is left loose, a service valve cap might leak, releasing its refrigerant. If you tighten it too much, you…
The fastener that holds the main rotor to the mast in the Bell Iroquois UH-1 “Huey” helicopter was called the Jesus Nut by helicopter pilots and their passengers in Vietnam. Given that if anything went wrong with this nut in flight, the rotor would go spinning off to an unknown destination and the helicopter left…
Overhead cranes are critical infrastructure for the industries which use them, including shipping, rail, freight, warehousing, metallurgy, paper production, heavy manufacturing, and any industry where heavy weights must be continually lifted in the same area. When an overhead crane goes out of service, it can bottleneck significant portions, or the entirety, of a company’s daily…
As tunnel workers know, boring machines are anything but. Ranging from merely large to staggeringly huge, these complicated devices chew through loam, clay, and solid rock to excavate large and small tunnels across the world. What’s also enormous is the degree to which the success of a tunneling project rests on the proper maintenance of…
Scuba diving can be a wonderful experience. Whether witnessing the multiplicity of ocean life in the reefs and kelp forests or mapping hidden caves in mountain lakes, scuba divers experience an element unknown to those of us who walk above. But with that comes an element of danger. Scuba divers—from coastal tourists to scientists to…