tastethecake

2 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

I don't think you meant it, but it came off as "cough it up". Very entitled sounding. You could have searched the forum, checked the small arms section, checked my various haunts (there's a bit about them on my Twitter, even), googled it, or even asked me a little more nicely.

 

I know what you meant. But abbreviating "pardon me for asking, but are you willing to share them? I'm very interested." comes off a lot more differently than "mind sharing?" One is pretty definitively polite, the other isn't.

Thanks for letting me know. I have to try to improve my "internet etiquette" in the future, its been a frequent failing of mine. That and pushing the enter key instead of the period key in DM's.

1 hour ago, Sturgeon said:

 

Fucking zoomers, man.

Don't expect me to hold you protecting your own intellectual property against you.

2 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

All of my rifle designs, for example, were production engineered despite the fact that I knew when I started they would never get made outside of 3D printed mockups.

Mind sharing them? 
 

6 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

That's a bit of a goal post shift. An engineer making a mistake does not equal him entirely forgetting the concept that what he's working on has to be produced in the end.

There goes my inner /k/ommando revealing itself again I suppose. Yes, that is a goal post shift. You are right when you say engineers that are actually employable have to keep production in mind. Sometimes that can be hard to see from a machinist's perspective but it is absolutely true.

4 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

Who that video is most enlightening to I think would be generalist historians and people coming from an art background. Not "anyone designing anything". Most people who design things are in some kind of workflow where the things they design are getting made (you typically can't get paid otherwise). And frankly, anyone with literally only as much formal engineering education as I have (~1 yr) should absolutely know better.

You make a good point though, I think I probably overstated the "enlightenment factor" of that video.

11 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

Not by any engineer who's actually working, it isn't.

Optimally, yeah, but this kind of thing can happen even to good engineers. 

I remember one time where an engineer in charge of fixtures got WAY task saturated and ended up designing a fixture that held a part on a contour instead of just on the base of the part to simplify his workload. Peacetime production is different then wartime production like that, you have to weigh the cost of the time the engineer spends designing an easy to make and effective fixture versus something you can design in an hour with some crazy 3D contour and have some local CNC shop make for you in 1 week.

5 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

These were the height of sophisticated manual (!) tooling, in my opinion. The big downside is that they are highly specialized, you can do one operation per (very expensive) horizontal milling tool. Nothing else.

Makes me wonder what the plan is to utilize old iron like that today in a wartime scenario.

Found this 1 hour video and I think it would be really eye opening for anyone designing anything. Each little feature of that doohickey you drew up in cad? Yeah, someone has to machine it. Which is obvious but I think it gets overlooked far too often.

Found this instructional manual on screw machine (think of it as all mechanical CNC machine that takes forever to tool up) setup, and it got me thinking about how much of a lost art running one of these things is. CNC lathes and machines in general are obviously much easier to set up but they still cannot match the potential of a multiple spindle screw machine that can spit out parts like nobody's business (they can come quite close however). 

Another topic of conversation that fascinates me is the concept of the multiple spindle milling machine, at first glance it seems like an inelegant solution to the problem of increasing mill production, but that's just me. Does anyone have any idea if form tools were ever used to cut the outer profile of parts in one pass on these machines? 

Perhaps I am looking at this from the wrong way however,  once production becomes so important that you need to improve the output of a screw machine, it might be best to look at other options (die casting, stamping, etc.).

One last note, I wanted to see what people think of stamping sheet metal gears. Is this just a novelty thing someone does for their CAD portfolio or something actually viable?

More sources below...
How many spindles are really necessary?
Running a multiple spindle machine in a small part run world

Ah, okay. Thank you for the clarification.

27 minutes ago, LoooSeR said:

   M4 highway looks like it was used to shoot next Bond movie

They look like spikes more then they look like any sort of area denial cluster munition.
 

On 3/9/2020 at 5:33 PM, Sturgeon said:

Do they need those rounds? Wrong question. Do those rounds benefit them and assist them in their mission? Absolutely.

I am sure that they do indeed benefit greatly from those larger calibers. However the question I really am interested in is "Is it worth the production time and effort in a total war scenario". I also probably should scale down the scope for adopting a 5.56 like cartridge for all of the infantry to just squad level weapons, since mechanized formations need the punch of larger caliber weapons for anti vehicle purposes. However, this concept of mine is a little bit stupid now that I investigate it on a deeper level, it probably is just some mental backlash to the 6.8/7.62 rifle pain train the US military is going through right now.

TLDR: You guys have convinced me that this sorta idea makes no sense.