Custom tooling to the rescue

Sometimes things are difficult to build....enter the help of custom tooling! In this episode, we highlight some of the applications for which we might order custom tooling, how they can help us assemble boards more efficiently and accurately, and some things you might want to do if you'd like to avoid custom tooling becoming necesesary.

Show Links:
Stentech products

pickplacepodcast.com

Transcript

Chris: 0:08

Welcome to the pick place podcast, a show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington

Melissa: 0:17

And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub

Chris: 0:19

long time. No speak, Melissa.

Melissa: 0:21

very long time.

Chris: 0:23

Yep. It's been all of what let's see here. Seven, eight minutes. As we mentioned in previous episodes, we're recording ahead because we are going to be each taking separate trips for a while and we want to keep the content rolling. Keep everybody learning.

Melissa: 0:38

There was something that we learned in the last seven minutes that we can catch the people up.

Chris: 0:44

Yeah, this is uh, well, we're gonna call this our 50th episode.

Melissa: 0:49

yeah,

Chris: 0:50

it's our, it's our Jubilee. It's our Jubilee episode. Big five zero mm-hmm

Melissa: 0:55

big five zero. Well, according to our podcast um, publishing app, we use it is our 50th episode. So.

Chris: 1:06

Except we, that means we have to call our intro episode, episode zero.

Melissa: 1:12

Well, no, then it, then this would be number 49.

Chris: 1:15

Ugh. I can't keep track of this. No, because our episode on flux is gonna be episode 48. Then our episode on intrusive Soering will be episode 49.

Melissa: 1:31

And then this

Chris: 1:32

this will be 50. Yep. Yep. Anyway, we're just gonna call it 50, even if it's 49 or 51, we're gonna call this one 50 happy, happy podcast Jubilee. it's a very timely reference from, from today when we're recording this on June 3rd and you're listening to this in sometime in July.

Melissa: 1:52

Yep.

Chris: 1:55

yes. Our friends over across the pond are celebrating their Queens. What do they call it's platinum Jubilee cuz it's it's

Melissa: 2:01

oh yeah, yeah.

Chris: 2:01

It's their 70

Melissa: 2:03

Wow.

Chris: 2:04

we'll we'll have a platinum Jubilee celebration for our 70th episode. What do you think?

Melissa: 2:07

Sounds good.

Chris: 2:09

Maybe we'll make that the the Soder alloy episode. Cause cuz it'll be plat. The platinum jute. oh boy, we are a couple of knuckleheads.

Melissa: 2:21

So, what do you got for our special 50th episode? What exciting content are we gonna

Chris: 2:26

yeah, no, it's not anything particularly 50th related because we only just realized this is our 50th episode. It is it is about custom tooling.

Melissa: 2:35

Ooh,

Chris: 2:36

Doesn't sound super interesting,

Melissa: 2:40

we're gonna make it interesting.

Chris: 2:41

we're gonna make it interesting. I just think that like, like with everything. reflow soldering does not sound that interesting, but when you actually get into the weeds of it, it's like, huh, there's a lot going on there that I didn't realize, you know? And I think the same can be said for for custom tools now, you know, as a manufacturer, we're, we're lazy. Right? We don't wanna do things the hard way. We don't like fixing things. We don't like rework. We don't like, you know, any of this kind of nonsense where things are just difficult to build. So sometimes if a product is difficult to build, we will design custom tools. We will get these made, there are various vendors that can make all kinds of tools for us. You can, you can literally just draw it up in you know, Autodesk or SolidWorks or something like that on shape and, and have a, a tool and die company, machine it up for you or whatever. But oftentimes when, you know, This industry has, you know, its own sort of sub-industry of making custom tools and custom tooling to handle the assembly of circuit ports. So like probably I would say the most common reason that custom tooling gets made, maybe not the most common reason the, I would say, let me put it this way. The most common reason is why, why we get custom to made. Is to deal with through whole components that have a weird shape or a weird geometry. Typically this means like they're, they're either like a right angle through whole connector of some type. Maybe it's like a a big coax connector. These are pretty common. It could be like some kind of weird push button switch and, and what happens is because it's right angle, it just wants to tip over. It doesn't wanna sit flat on the board and that's no bueno, cuz we want it to sit nice and flat. Or maybe you have like, You know, you have a panel that's gonna go on the end of your board when it gets into its enclosure. And it has to line up really, really tight. You don't want any, you know, you know, we don't want any reveal around your connectors, your ports or anything. So you want that panel nice and snug on the end. Well, then that means we have to kind of nail how. Right. Angle components are lined up. We can't have 'em drifting or skewed or crooked or anything like that. We gotta have.'em just right. And sometimes it can be really difficult to get these things, to stay exactly where we need them to stay while we're soldering them. Because, you know, if you hand solder it, you can like, okay, solder one little joint and then, oh, it's a little crooked. And so you heat up the joint again and you move it back. Hey. It's done. Right. And then you just, so the rest of the joints, and now it's exactly where it needs to be. That's great. But hand soldering is very expensive and very time consuming and it just, there's all kinds of it's fraught with all kinds of problems and complexities. So you wanna be able to automatically sold these things. And that's where getting custom tooling comes in. It's, it's you know, Custom tooling can be for a, a whole variety of applications, but you know, when it comes to what I just described, basically trying to get these right angle components just right. That's one of the most common things we do. We also have like, sometimes you just can't get things to sit nice and flat. So we have this we may have talked about it on the show before this customer called. Public radio. The capital T capital P capital R. And this product has these battery clips for holding AA batteries. And they're tough to get those clips nice and flat and, and stay nice and flat. Just basically just the shape of the clip and, and, and the whole size and everything. It's just, it's just not that easy to get them to stay nice and flat. So, We got custom tools that basically we set the, we set the board inside this tray for lack of a better term. And, and then there's these pins on the tray that this top spring loaded. Pallet, like kind of pushes down and, and it, you know, lines up with these pins and then those spring loaded plungers kind of push down on those battery tabs. So the spring is holding that nice and tight to the board and preventing it from popping up so that while you're soldering it, it's gonna stay in place like perfectly But like, let's say you had like, kind of a lightweight through whole component that wants to float around a little bit while it's being soldered, you could use the same thing. So, we'll include a link in the show notes that kind of it, it links to one of our suppliers of these special tooling. So you can see what they look like. They're, they're typically made of this sort of like. It might be a brand name Durastone. It, it kind of feels like stone. It almost feels like it's kind of porous. I don't think it is PS necessarily, but it's often kind of like a layered up, you know, epoxy impregnated, some kind of material that they then machine. And you know, they cut out with a CNC machine or maybe a, you know, what do they call it? A water jet, something like that. I'm not sure exactly what they cut these things with. Probably a CNC machine for the most part. And and then you rest your board on that, you know, however, it's all cut out and, and it holds it in place. And then there's all kinds of things you can do with it. Well, you know, the trouble with talking about this, Melissa is there's like,

Melissa: 7:51

so

Chris: 7:51

there's like, So many things it can be used for right. Unlimited number of things. It can be used for some, some other popular reasons that we might go out and buy custom tooling is if you have like an especially thin board, so say you you're doing like a 0.2 or a 0.4 millimeter thick board. That's that's really, really thin. You're talking about a really flexible, thin board and yeah. Okay. Maybe your board is. Five millimeters by 10 millimeters. Well, we can't build a board that small, so we're gonna have to put this into a larger board and, you know, build it in a multi array. And now we're dealing with that super thin board. Well, you know, all of electronics manufacturing for the most part, not talking about flex board manufacturing, but it's all designed about these boards being relatively rigid and, and they are their own tooling because of that rigidness, because of that 1.6 millimeter thick board. They're nice and rigid and strong. It's got that fiberglass, right? But when you get that thin, you, you lose most of that rigidity handling these things can be a bit of a pain and stencil printing on them can be a pain pick and placing on them can be a pain because they, they just so flexible. As soon as you put any force on them, they just give there's no strength to them. And you can get fancy with, you know, little pins inside your machines and everything like that, but sometimes you just want it to just be, you wanna be lazy. right. Going back to my original point, you just wanna be able to put this thing in some kind of a carrier that makes it nice and rigid. And that's another application for, for custom tooling, especially if, if your really thin board is double sided, because if it's single sided, Sometimes we can just tape that board, literally just use high temp tape and tape that board down to a rigid board. And then we just use that as the, the custom tooling. But when you're doing double sided, now you've got, you know, you don't wanna just put this board on all these components and put all that weight on those components and potentially crack them or damage them. And, and you know, you, you wanna have custom tooling that, that conforms around all of those components and supports the board, you know, and just allows those components to hang freely on the bottom side. So that's another reason why we might invest in custom tooling. So if you're, if you're designing a very thin board, And you have double sided components. This is something that you should probably have a conversation with your manufacturer ahead of time. Like, Hey, do you think maybe you need some custom tooling to process these because, you know, I listened to this clown on this stupid podcast and he told me but yeah, trust me. It's you know, custom tooling can be pretty valuable. When we go to reflow boards if it's at like a really not, not thick, but a really large panel or a really large board. And we're, reflowing it. And maybe you've got some heavy components on there. Maybe like we have this one customer with these big, heavy inductors. If it's single-sided again, a lot of this comes down to double sided, but if it's single side we will probably just put that on this sort of a mesh belt on the bottom of our reflow oven and it'll come out fine because the mesh will support the bottom side of the board. But if it's double sided, we have to hang that board on pin rails while it goes through reflow. And when you do that, and you've got all this weight and it's a great big 400 millimeter 500 millimeter panel. It's gonna sag. It's gonna bow. And sometimes that sag can be so severe. It can actually fall off the pin rails. It can, it can effectively shrink that length because of the sag by the three millimeter pin rail depth that is specked by the SMEMA spec. I haven't seen that happen. In a long time. I saw it at a company I used to work at many years ago. It happened, but yeah, that, that can be a pain. So then by having custom tooling that you can rest this great big board in it keeps it nice and flat as it goes through that reflow oven because this material, this Durastone, whatever they call it material is super rigid and does not deform with heat. And, and so, whatever you put on it is just gonna take that same shape. It's gonna take that super rigid shape. So it, it makes for really nice reflow process. But by far like the surface Mount process, these custom tooling is used there, but it's, it's less common, you know, by far it's the through whole process that most of these things are done. We talked about earlier, the right angle connectors, the real lightweight components, the, the parts that just don't wanna sit flat. There's all kinds of reasons why you might have this custom tooling with, with these, I think the common term for, for these spring loaded plungers, like I described them earlier. I think the common term they use for this is called a top hat.

Melissa: 12:40

Hmm.

Chris: 12:41

literally like monopoly, man. Like top hat is what they call him. But they're cuz they go on top, right? So you set your board inside this frame and then you put this, you know, this top hat over it and it pushes down on everything and holds everything flat. Yeah. If you have like a really, really long connect. You know, that's gonna heat and warp and twist differently than the circuit board. And so you're gonna have, you know, it may lift up on one end or the other, and, you know, you may have kind of inconsistent results. And if you wanna keep that nice and flat, the top hat can push down on it and keep it flat and prevent it from warping. There there's all kinds of applications for it if you have. Okay, so you've gotta design. With surface Mo components that are super, super close to the through hole components where we need to Soder them with our selective. So machine we can get custom tooling that will actually, you can, you can build these cavities and then you can put these walls like around these cavities, basically just, you know, picture the picture, the the great wall of China, but, you know, sort of upside down, I guess , no same, same way, but mounted to the bottom of the pallet and. That's where your surface Mount components they're sitting inside the walls. You know, those two, those two rows on your great wall of China, your surface Mount component is inside that, but then the. the edges of the walls are pushed up against the bottom of your circuit board. And then you can put your Soder nozzle right up on exactly where you need to Soder those through hole pins. And you won't wipe out the surface Mount components because this custom tooling is blocking it. It's got these walls in the way, preventing it from flowing over and getting on your surface mal components. So we've used it for stuff like that. Sometimes if they're really close, you can't use the same type of like Durastone material. They might have to be made of titaniuim so then it can get, it can get into some big money, but if you, if you do enough volume and, and that's just the design and, and that's the way the design has to be, it's an option. But you know, with all these things, it's to make a more consistent, more reliable product. And we want to be able to, you know, do that each and every time, like I. We're lazy. We , we don't wanna fight these things. You know, we just want things to go nice and smooth and easy. And, and the reason you start to talk about custom tooling is because, you know, you're not just building five boards. Like, if you're building five boards, we're just gonna hand solder it whatever, you know, if you got some component near a surface, whatever, just hand out that 1, 2, 3, 4 pins, whatever it is, we're just gonna get it done. It's just five boards. It's you know, when you start to get into that, no, man's land of like a hundred, five, 500 a thousand boards. You start to go, oh boy, you know, I don't wanna hand sold a thousand boards. And so it might make sense to invest in in this custom tooling it, it it's just gonna make everything much easier. Now the thing is that custom tooling, the, the biggest problem with it all is that it's custom

Melissa: 15:34

Yeah. Oh

Chris: 15:35

right. So the first time we build something. We don't necessarily know what we don't know. We don't know that we're gonna need custom tooling. So you place a five piece order works great. And we build it and everybody's happy. And then, all right, go to the presses. I need 500 of 'em and all of a sudden we're like,

Melissa: 15:54

oh.

Chris: 15:54

you know, this is really challenging to build and yeah. Now oh, is right. And we're gonna need to get custom tooling made. Well, That custom tooling. It might take two weeks just to design it, just to design it and then you need to get it made and then you need to test it. And almost always, almost inevitably you don't nail it the first time. Usually you nail it the second time usually. But you might need to do it, you know? Modify it again. And a third time and a fourth time, we have one job that was particularly tricky. We're already on our third revision of the custom tooling for it. And we just got another order for 5,000 pieces from this customer. And, and we looked back at our notes and sure enough, we put a note if we run these again, change this about the custom tooling. So we're gonna be on the fourth version of our of our custom tooling for this. you know, that that all takes time. So if, if you're looking for a quick turn and everything, it, this is why manufacturing takes takes a while to get up to speed. You know how like, you know, everybody always complains that the Xbox or the new PlayStation it's, it's taking forever to get deliveries and they can't make enough of 'em. And it's like, well, it takes time. That's just custom tooling is just one little example. It takes time to ramp up all this stuff. As, as we engineer everything and design everything to, to work for all of it. And like I said, there's, there's this own little sort of submarket that caters to the, to these needs here in the United States and manufacturing. Anyway I know that like your bigger shops, like obviously Foxconn's gonna have all of its own custom tool makers, like right in their buildings. They probably have hundreds, perhaps even thousands of custom, probably, probably certainly thousands of their custom tool makers right on their campus. But for smaller shops, such as ourselves, you know, if you're 50, 7500 people, you're not, you're probably not gonna have somebody in the building that all they do is make custom tools for you. So you have to, you know, gotta ship these things around and all that kind of stuff. But you know, it is, it is it's just a fact of life and it, and it, and it does take time to get these things designed. Some of them can be pretty quick though. Right? So like we talked about earlier, If it's just like a really thin board and we just need support for it to keep it flat or it's double sided or something like that. Or it's the huge board. We just need support to keep it flat. You know, you could probably. You're gonna get that designed in a day. You're gonna get it cut in a few days. You're gonna have it in maybe a week, you know, a little bit more than a week. That's not so bad. It's, it's the other things like the top hats, you know, the the spring loaded plungers you know, if you need a pusher or a polar, which these are, these are sort of like, Well, when you put the board in the machine, in the, in the fixture, in the custom tooling, fixture is by the way, another word for custom tooling fixtures. When you put it in the fixture, you, you wanna justify that board oftentimes to, to one corner and you, because that way there, you have a really repeatable process on that fixture. Well, How do you do that? Because you can't make it so tight that you can't get the board out of it. Well, you have these like pushers or polars. There are these special tools that will pull the board or push the board into one corner and then that might be kind of spring loaded. And so you can pull that. Push her outta the way and then you can lift the board out now. You know, but those things take time to design just right. There might be maybe you need to use tooling pins, and so you need to press the tooling pins into the board. You're not gonna machine them out of the D stone, cuz it's not gonna be strong enough for the tooling pins. So you have to press these stainless steel pins into it. There's there's all these things that can take time as part of these custom fixtures to get made. And you, you know, you might not just be able to turn that around right away. A lot of times what we've done is we've just gone ahead and just like started. Doing it the hard way, right. Not being lazy, but just going ahead and hand soldering things just to try to like, okay, can we, can we get you just like 20 a day for now or something while we're ramping up, you know? And then all, and they don't know, but in the meantime, you're like, come on, let's get this custom tooling, let's get these fixtures. You know, get these things made. Yeah. I'll, you know, sometimes the better than that though, is to have a conversation ahead of time and, and talk to your contract manufacturer and ask them like do you think this job would require custom tooling? Is there something about it that would, you know, we plan on getting 5,000 of these, so, you know, maybe we should have this conversation ahead of time, get this brought up to speed. So we're not caught off guard by. You know, it's like with everything, this, this is the common, the common theme of the pick place podcast is make it bigger and have a conversation.

Melissa: 20:29

Yeah, that's all I need to know.

Chris: 20:32

it's all you need to do, make it bigger and have a conversation. Yeah, it's, it's it's, it's, it's the way of life, but this is it's, you know, this is sort of why there's this. So if you've been making a product for a long time, you know, perhaps it's the same design you've been making for 5, 6, 7, 10 years. You probably have almost no issues making that now. Right? You you've, you've gotten to the point where. You know, your, your supplier, your contract manufacturer is hitting their targets. They're they're, the yields are great, very little rework, very few defects in the field. You know, life is good. There's, there's this phenomenon. And, and I think there actually is like a term for it though. I can't remember, but it it's, it's this like phenomenon that manufacturing gets better and better. and more efficient and less expensive over time. And, and, and custom tooling and fixtures and things like these. This is a big part of why it gets better. Obviously the people who are building it learn more about it and they remember things and they, and they document things so that the next time they go to build it, they know like, oh, you. C2 S polarity isn't defined on this board, but we have it documented now you know, it's not on the silk screen, but we have a document that tells us the polarity of it. So we don't have to go and do that research anymore. It might take you. You know, 30 minutes to try to identify the polarity of C2 when it's not on the silk screen, you know, maybe who knows. You have to reach out to the customer, you have to give 'em a call. It takes time. But then once, you know, when you document it, you don't have to ask again. So you stack up all those efficiencies and then you get custom tooling designed to make life easy because you're lazy and you just want life to be easy. You know, over time it just gets better and better and better and better. So this is one you. One of the reasons why as you've been building the same product for, for years and years, it, it, you just, all of a sudden you get into this flow and things just, they just go good. Right. You just have less and less problems. You start to just knock down these things that become a challenge for you. Yeah. I. I, you know, part of me wants to say, you know, if you're having problems with your contract manufacturer and delivering a quality product stick it out, cuz they'll solve it. But part of me also wants to say, or just call us and we'll

Melissa: 22:50

right. Just

Chris: 22:52

we'll help you out. Yeah. Just send it to us. But honestly, so like we've had problems with, with building products before for customers and really, really struggled with certain components. And, but then. You know, thankfully our customers were great and they worked with us and they were patient with us. And then we got it figured out. And now we're, you know, we're just banging these things out, just like they're another oh 6 0 3 resistor. You know, it, it, it takes time to sometimes learn these new processes and learn that you need a fixture to address these certain problems. But once you do you know, life gets much, much easier. So. But, like I said, there's challenges associated with these things, right? It's sometimes, you know, it's a 500 piece order and you just gotta ship it. Like you don't have time. Like, by the time you're done designing and manufacturing, a custom fixture, it's already out the door, you know, you gotta get that to your customer's hands. But it, it can be worth if you, you know, for, for somebody like us, if we identify an opportunity to get a custom fixture, to get custom tooling made for your order then we will go ahead and you. Say, Hey, we, we had to ship these 500 pieces. Do you think you're gonna order more. Because if you are, then we'll take the time now before your next order to get the custom fixture made. So that by the time you place your next order, and we build that next order, you know, we have it and we can hit the ground running. You know, there's, there's plenty of times where you may hear from us after an order's been fulfilled asking those kinds of questions so that we can get that kind of stuff done. Cuz you know, like I said, you just don't always have the time to figure it out. And most of these things they're like, you'd be surprised. Inexpensive, some of these things are even some of the ones with the complicated top hats and stuff. Like they may only cost like seven, 800, maybe, maybe a thousand bucks at most. A lot of them like the simpler ones are anywhere to three to $500 a piece. The titanium ones, those, those are really expensive. You're, you're talking thousands of dollars, but if you need it, it will pay for itself. If, if you can work around design issues because of well, I shouldn't say design issues, but let, let's call it a, a design restriction, right? Cuz you need that resistor really, really close to through hole pin or whatever. Then custom tooling can go a long way in helping you automate things and, and keep costs down and everything. So yeah, you gotta make that$3,000 investment up front, but in the long run you know, it will pay for itself. So yeah, we, we love having custom tooling and, and special fixtures for jobs. It just, it just makes life easy. It's just like, I don't know how else to put it. Like here. Here's a good, here's a good illustration for you here. I'll give you a good analogy. Do you prefer drinking out of a glass or out of your hand?

Melissa: 25:28

Yeah.

Chris: 25:30

Right? Think about it. All a glass is, is a custom fixture for dispensing water. So you can drink it more easily. You could drink outta your hand. Of course you put your hand under the faucet and slurp it up. You're gonna get water. You're gonna be able to drink. It'll get the job done, but isn't a much easier to have a glass. Of course it is deep thoughts with Chris Denny use the glass better than the hand.

Melissa: 25:51

Unless

Chris: 25:51

you're a

Melissa: 25:54

cat

Chris: 25:56

you're a cat.. It's so true. good water bowl. Oh, you turned the on, why did they do that?

Melissa: 26:09

Yep. Yep.

Chris: 26:10

Yeah. Cats are weird, Yeah. Unless you're a cat. That's a good one, Melissa. I like that one. So I guess if you take anything out of this, I would just say, you know, if you're dealing with a thin board there's a very good chance that. Custom tooling may be necessary, especially if it's double sided, especially if it's double sided. So if you know, you're working on a design like that, give your manufacturer a call ahead of time and be like, Hey, can somebody take a look at my design? Do they think they're gonna need custom tooling to handle it may not always right. There may be ways that, that we can work around it. Very good chance that we can, but give 'em a call ahead of time so they can make the arrangements for that. And Yeah. If you have, you know, weird through hole components or right angles, and, and they're kind of top heavy, or you need, you need something to be perfectly straight, cuz you have an end panel or, you know, you need it to be perfectly flat because it's gotta fit just right in this such and such, whatever it is, you know, you may need custom tooling and, and it's worth having a conversation ahead of time getting, getting yourself prepared for that just in case. But if you can avoid super thin boards, if you can avoid. Double sided, super thin boards. If you can avoid some of these weird right. Angle connectors, you know, if, if the components can kind of snap in and hold themselves in place, that's better than if they just kind of drop in because then they, they stay in place. Nice and nice and clean. Yeah. There's. It's again, like I said, it's a tough one to talk about because there's just so many applications for custom tooling. It's, it's literal it's in the word it's custom it's,

Melissa: 27:42

That

Chris: 27:43

it's whatever it is that you're working on, we might need to make a custom fixture for it. And but yeah, just have a conversation ahead of time about it. Get that figured out and yeah. Allow your contract manufacturer to have a lazy life. The the moral of the story there. All right now, I really don't have energy to talk about my pet peeve.

Melissa: 27:59

You always have energy to talk about your

Chris: 28:01

Always have energy to talk about pet peeves, unless you have one for us. Melissa, do you have one?

Melissa: 28:06

I had one, but it's kind of boring, but maybe you can relate. I don't know. I feel like this is one that you might be able to relate to

Chris: 28:15

There there almost certainly is. I'm a very irritable person, Melissa. It's very

Melissa: 28:20

I don't think we've talked about this, but just. Poorly designed OnRamps on the freeway.

Chris: 28:27

unlikely. I can't

Melissa: 28:28

Yeah.

Chris: 28:29

interesting. Tell me more.

Melissa: 28:31

so like the ones where I'm thinking of the specific one on you might have gone on it when you're in west Springfield and it's the OnRamp on the 91 when you're going.

Chris: 28:45

Many times I take that every day on my way to

Melissa: 28:48

no, no, but to go to go south. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if the one going north is the same, but yeah, cuz it like curves around and then like you immediately have to merge with traffic.

Chris: 28:59

Yes.

Melissa: 29:01

Yeah. Or on ramps where you can't see the traffic, you can't see if there's oncoming traffic while you're merging, you know?

Chris: 29:10

Yes, absolutely.

Melissa: 29:12

And so you just kind of have to cross your fingers and hope you don't die.

Chris: 29:16

no, don't do that. Don't do that. please don't do that. Oh, I'm

Melissa: 29:24

Or just like come to a complete stop and then like, you know, hope your car gets up to speed fast enough.

Chris: 29:32

And that's an awful experience too, cuz it's very dangerous to be sitting on an on-ramp, you know, because somebody, some idiot like me in his zoom zoom car is gonna smash into you thinking that he's about to get on the highway.

Melissa: 29:42

Yeah. Oh, I actually, yeah. I have a funny story. That my mom told me she had some friends visiting that they were from, they were from Belgium. And I guess in Belgium, when you get on a highway, like it's normal, it's standard. You don't just

Chris: 29:58

they just hand out chocolate. They hand out chocolate

Melissa: 30:00

would be lovely. Love. Yeah. You just both are

Chris: 30:04

covered waffles.

Melissa: 30:06

oh, now I wanna Belgian waffle.

Chris: 30:08

covered in chocolate.

Melissa: 30:11

no, no, no. They have these little like crystals of sugar in them.

Chris: 30:15

Oh,

Melissa: 30:15

Like they're so good. Oh. And they're all nice and warm anyways.

Chris: 30:20

You can tell it's lunchtime on the east coast of the

Melissa: 30:22

yeah. Very hungry. And we were talking about donuts cuz it's donut day. So yeah. Anyways, I guess when you, before you get on a highway, you have to come to a stop. and then merge.

Chris: 30:33

Oh, yeah, sure.

Melissa: 30:34

So,

Chris: 30:35

that's, that's the standard way of getting on a highway in Belgium.

Melissa: 30:38

So then they were visiting and they were driving and they were getting on the highway and mom's like, what are you doing?

Chris: 30:44

And they stopped. Yeah, I'm I'm with you there on ramps on ramps are scary, you know, you're really, you, you, if you think about it, you're, you're the, the the force differential between the car going 65 and you going 20 is a lot and you gotta get it up to speed. So you don't get slammed into it. Is I get I'm a hundred percent with you there. They gotta be designed well,

Melissa: 31:08

yeah. And give you enough time to actually

Chris: 31:11

time. That's the key. Like if it's going uphill, it needs to be a long, long on ramp to give all the trucks and everything. Plenty of time to get up to speed. Getting on.

Melissa: 31:22

Yeah,

Chris: 31:23

Have you ever been on the merit Parkway in Connecticut?

Melissa: 31:26

I'm not sure.

Chris: 31:27

So the merit Parkway in Connecticut, it's a famous old, old, old highway. It's two lanes on each side. So four lanes total. No trucks are allowed on it, right? No, no box trucks, no 18 wheelers, nothing like that. Pickup trucks are allowed on obviously, but And it's like the OnRamps you do, you have to come to a stop. You cannot like, there's a big stop sign. You must stop because there is no OnRamp. It's, it's almost like taking just a 90 degree turn to get on this thing and people fly on it. They do. I think the, I think the highest speed limit on it might be 55 miles an hour, but people are doing 80. They're just screaming down this thing. And that's, that's a scary highway with poorly designed on ramps because it was designed probably like 80 years ago, you know?

Melissa: 32:09

When cars didn't even like go that fast.

Chris: 32:12

Exactly. Yeah, I'm a hundred percent with you there that, well, have you been to the on ramps? I mean, you must have been, especially in California, how they have the, the sort of the gated on ramp where it's there's you have to come to a stop there, there's a stoplight and then

Melissa: 32:26

oh yeah,

Chris: 32:26

you on. Yeah, those actually work really

Melissa: 32:29

I feel,

Chris: 32:30

a whole science behind them.

Melissa: 32:31

Yeah. Those ones don't feel as scary really. Cause I think, yeah. And because I think those ones usually are longer, you know, you're not just immediately merging with the traffic. You're kinda

Chris: 32:45

Right. And usually when they're turned on, the traffic is going kind of slow. So it's not so difficult to get on and merge.

Melissa: 32:51

yeah. Everyone else is already going slow. So.

Chris: 32:54

Yeah, those are there's actually that that'd be for nerds. If, if anybody has the same sentimentality as Chris does, you will appreciate there's some actually fascinating videos on YouTube about those things and how they work and how effective they are. It's and, and like there's a whole science behind it. It's sort of like the the, the analogy a lot of people use of the, the football players rushing out of the locker room. Like you gotta, you gotta go one at a time. Otherwise you're just gonna get stuck. And it's sort of the same principles as that. That was a good one, Melissa.

Melissa: 33:22

thanks. Yeah.

Chris: 33:24

How can you expect me not to be able to relate to a car related pet peeve? Come on.

Melissa: 33:32

I don't know. It just seems like it could be kind of boring,

Chris: 33:34

no, that's a good one. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. know the problem with all these things. And we mentioned it every time now is like, Like you were always kind of bothered by it, but now that you talked about it now, you're gonna be like super annoyed by it.

Melissa: 33:49

And if you listen to all these episodes, then you're

Chris: 33:53

you're just like, not even gonna leave your home. you're gonna order everything from Amazon. And when it comes with a poll tab, you're gonna send it back. good stuff. Good stuff. Well, if you have similar sentimental about poorly design on ramps, let us know email us contact, pick place podcast.com. Of course you can always tweet at us at CircuitHub or at w assembly.

Melissa: 34:19

Thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us in your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Chris: 34:30

And thanks for listening to 50 episodes. If you've listened to every episode, I would love to hear from you. That's super, super cool. And also I'm so sorry. so sorry. I think that's a good way to end it.