Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E9 Noah Burk | Asking Good Questions, RCM, & Macros
In this episode, Aaron Moncur sits down with Noah Burke, a certified SolidWorks professional and mechanical engineer, to explore the nuances of product design, engineering creativity, and the importance of asking the right questions. Noah shares insights from his journey at Pipeline and Colson Group, offering valuable advice for aspiring engineers.
Main Topics:
- Transitioning from hands-on assembly to product design
- The art of asking effective engineering questions
- Importance of SolidWorks certification
- Troubleshooting design challenges
- Emerging trends in 3D printing and product development
- Personal motivation and engineering passion
About the guest: Noah Burk is an experienced engineer with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a Minor in Manufacturing, along with a Certified SolidWorks Professional (CSWP) credential. He began his career at AccuBilt Automated Systems, where he contributed to drawing packages, design projects, and machine assembly. In 2022, he joined Pipeline Design & Engineering, developing advanced manufacturing processes, custom fixtures, and automated machines. Now, as a Product Design Engineer at Colson Group USA, Noah designs mobility solutions, ensuring performance, quality, and aesthetic standards. His career reflects a commitment to excellence, continuous learning, and adaptability.
Links:
Noah Burk - LinkedIn
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Don't test with too many variable changes at once. You've changed one variable. Test because you change five variables and you don't know what fixed it.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we have the absolute pleasure of speaking with Noah Burke, a certified SolidWorks professional and accomplished mechanical engineer. Noah's journey has taken him from hands on roles in design and assembly to his current position as a product design engineer at Colson group USA. Notably, Noah was also a valued member of our team here at pipeline where he consistently demonstrated exceptional skill and dedication. Noah so fun to be able to talk to you again. It's been what, maybe a year or so, something like that, and it's just really nice to see your face and hear your voice. Well, what made you decide to become an engineer? Noah,
Noah Burk:it's funny. Somebody asked me this about a week or two ago, and it was really, really early on, when I was pretty young, math and science were always my, you know, they came pretty easily to me. Grammar and Spelling, that's we're still working on that one day.
Aaron Moncur:I can attest to that one. Yeah, yeah,
Noah Burk:it's, if you give me a formula, got it, but, yeah, um, so they, you know, math and science came pretty easy to me, and I knew, you know, that was heavily involved in being an engineer. A couple of my parents friends were engineers, and they kind of really spoke highly about them. And everybody I talked to spoke highly about, you know, knowing that engineer so and so is an engineer, being around, you know, engineers, I didn't really know what they did. They seemed to kind of stand a little taller, and they were just respected individual, and they did math and science stuff. So it's like, well, I can do that stuff. So let me give a crack at being an engineer. So really early on, I decided to give it a shot. I think my sophomore year in high school is when I took my first CAD class. And CAD came pretty quick, too. And so I went out to Jackson area Career Center for two years, and that rolled into my first job, doing CAD and and getting to see, you know, automation and what you know, engineering has actually applied. There's a good amount of people that go through school all the way through college without getting that on the job. Look at things. And I think that's pretty crucial to see, see it up front and know, okay, this I want to do.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I can also attest to the fact that you are very talented with CAD I mean, from the day that you were hired, you hit the ground running, knew exactly what you were doing, and only got even better as as time went on. I think Accu built was your first job, like, you know, real job, working as an engineer. Is that accurate? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you did a bunch of assembly there. You did CAD as well, but I think you did quite a lot of hands on assembly work. How did that like, hands on assembly work and that experience influence your your approach as a designer.
Noah Burk:That's that's been a pretty big, pretty big influence of really stepping through of how we're going to get this together, because you can design a lot of things in CAD world that you can't make and you can't assemble. And in the beginning, you know, you could run some of the interference checks and, oh, it all checks out. That'll be good. And then you you know, get into it. You know, when things are moving specifically in automation, if there's a bullheaded way carriage smacks into it, well, that's going to be a big problem. So that's one of the best ways to learn is to take those designs and and walk them into the real world and see the mistake. Some, you know, could be major. Some could be little things like, if a bolt head's hitting, we just have to counter bore it right, and it'll be tucked away. But, you know, whole plates could be incorrect. The Accu bill, we used a lot of shims, which was nice, so there was a little forgiveness, but hands on, and seeing how much work goes into the things you design too, right? Because in CAD you just float stuff in there, and you put mates on it, and you get faster and faster doing that, um, but you know your your CAD level, as it increases, you can go a lot faster than anybody can put it together. So. What I've learned thanks to the great people at pipelines, specifically Mike, it's good to slow down. I would get so fast and I overlook little things. So slowing down and taking a second and just sitting there, it might not look like you're doing anything, just staring at the screen and zooming around at stuff, but it's it's really crucial. It saves you a lot of time and money to fix stuff in CAD versus fix stuff in real life.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I think that's a big point. There's a significant difference between action and progress. And I think a lot of us have a tendency to just perform action right? We just want to do, do, do because we know something we could do. So we do it, as opposed to sitting back and thinking about All right, let's, let's try to project, you know, three, four steps into the future. Is what I'm doing now going to facilitate an efficient process moving forward? Or are there some things that I should be changing right now so that I make my future life a little bit easier. So, as you know very well here at pipeline, we do manufacturing processes and automated machines and custom fixtures. Can you think of a project, whether it was a pipeline or somewhere, somewhere else, but that was particularly challenging for you and how you overcame those challenges.
Noah Burk:There's a lot of them, a lot of them to pick from. That was one of the fun things, is the challenge. So, you know, if, if everything was the same and everything was easy, everyone would do it, and having that challenge. And some of the projects that we would get a pipeline were especially fun because people say, you know, we've tried to do it and we can't, we can't find a way they would come to pipeline for health. And so that just was extra drive to, okay, how can we figure this out? Um, it was great brainstorming with people. I really like doing that me and Mark one of the one of the ones that I'll touch on is the the punch prototype. So it was really small distal tip, and we had to find a way to remove this heat, heat, shrink wrap and puncture it with a mechanical device, because if you did anything with a laser, it produced toxic fumes and mark. And I you actually ended up having such a good brainstorming session. We stayed a little over. Just think about all these crazy ways we could, you know, okay, they're going to load it like this, and then what's going to happen next, and it's all going to be mechanical, and we got to find a way to poke yoke it, and we ended up on this little magic box. And, you know, part of the reason why I've gotten so much better at CAD, especially working, you know, during my time at pipelines, because there was great people around me. Mark was one of them, John's one of them. Aaron doesn't do a ton of CAD nowadays, but I'm sure he's real good too. And so I think it was the next day or the day after that, Mark's like, Hey, check this out. And he has got, like, a moving mechanism going on with the planetary gear and cams and bearings. And I'm like, wow, it was, you know, really early on at my my time at Pipeline, I was okay. I didn't do a lot of the hard, hard work there, but the figuring that stuff out, you know, that brainstorm session. And then eventually we incorporated a e stop mechanism on it, so when they punched the device, it would stay locked and you weren't able to unlock it until you turned this handle and it cut the heat shrink. And then once it cut, it would pop up and it would allow the operator to unload it. So, you know, working with somebody else to mold those two ideas together. When you work with different people in CAD you find ways, you know, 1000 ways to skin a cat. There's probably a million ways in SolidWorks. So find all these unique ways that they would they do something that you never would have thought of. And then you think, Oh, that would be really good for this scenario, and that scenario so that that one really stick it out to me, because that was kind of the eye opening, wow, like we're doing some pretty crazy stuff
Aaron Moncur:here. I remember them that one as well. It was mechanically beautiful. I mean, it was a work of art. And a black box is a good way to describe it, because from the outside, you couldn't really see all the the intricate mechanisms that were going on. But yeah, it was a work of mechanism art, for sure. Let's see transitioning to the Colson group, which is where you are now. What? Oh. What are some of the things that you're enjoying most there in your current role,
Noah Burk:my current role, it's been so it's new product development of products, right? And at Pipeline. This is another great thing about pipelines. It could be automation, could be product development. There was a mixed bag. So kind of jump back and forth, which is awesome. Now it's mostly, pretty much all product development, so honing in on products. So a lot of times we'll take, you know, we're getting customer requests for a specific thing that you know the market wants, and some people want one extreme, you know, there's that bell curve right of possibilities that you could design for. And so really honing in on what product is going to help the most amount of customers they're going to purchase. So finding a way to, you know, whether that's make things adjustable or designing multiple configurations right from the get go, different top plates and things like that. So it's much more product oriented now. But my type of pipeline, you know, being able to ask the customers the questions, right? Because a lot of times it's not a, you're not talking to a technical, you know, engineer. On the other side, you're just talking to somebody, and they're like, I want it like this. And so you have to, okay, so how can I ask them a question and be able to get a lot of information from that answer, you know, more than just the answer to that simple question. It could be, if I, if I ask this question, I can get an answer to free questions. So being able to talk with them and ask those, those questions. And you know, if you're talking to somebody who's not the best with technical stuff, you know, simplifying it, and you can, you know, gather information from that too. They might not be able to say, you know, we need our spring rate to be this and it needs to be dampened this well, and it needs to be, you know, have steel this thick, and it needs to be this material type. But you can ask questions to kind of get that information from them. You know? Oh, is it going in the clean room? Oh, you know, how much weight are you putting on this cart? Things like that.
Aaron Moncur:I think that's such an important skill to have, is knowing how to ask good questions. I noticed this with sales people a lot, and I know we're not. We're not this is not a podcast about sales, but in a way, we're all sales people. We're all trying to sell something, our ideas, our philosophies, whatever they are, engineers included. And the best salespeople that I've worked with don't just talk at me. They ask me thoughtful questions, and they listen to my responses, and that's what guides the conversation. And I've worked and I've found that that's rare. Most people, most salespeople, and just people in general, don't ask you many questions. They tell you what they want to tell you, right? Here's the feature that this product has, and here's the warranty that it has, and here's why it's so great. Well, okay, that's all fine and well, but you don't even know what I'm looking for, because you haven't asked me any questions. So I love that, that you're talking about questions, and it's just such an important skill for for an engineer or anyone to have to be to get really good at asking thoughtful questions? Yeah, I
Noah Burk:totally agree. I read a book. I can't remember the name. Read a book recently that talked about, you know, like kind of soft leading, right, not barking orders or demanding answers, but asking those questions to get the information that you seek in a soft way, right? Because if you bark or demand, people don't like that, right? Yeah, right. Like get what you want, you might get it fast, but after they give you the information and they turn around, I did not enjoy my time working with you, right? Yeah, and they go somewhere
Aaron Moncur:else. Might burn the relationship
Noah Burk:Exactly. Don't want to do that.
Aaron Moncur:You have your your certified SolidWorks professional certification. How? How has that impacted your, career, or just your design skills in general. Like, what has that done for you? And do you recommend it to other engineers who are working in CAD
Noah Burk:Yeah, I do recommend it. It's, you know, it is something that can go on the resume. I have it on my resume, and some people might not know what it is. But it does show that you, you know, had the skills to attain it right in this seat, the professional one. It was challenging. I studied for it for a while, and it gave me a new look at taking these Practice Exams and doing really complicated part, geometry and things like that. If you are going to take it, I recommend watching the RCM videos and learning a bit about that, because that can be really helpful. One of the things they do in the the exam is they have you design a part, and then they have you change certain things, depending on how you designed it. Those changes can blow up everything, or they can be a seamless transition, right? So RCM really helped me out.
Aaron Moncur:And RCM stands for resilient CAD modeling, and that's a methodology that we didn't actually develop, but maybe refined the process a little bit, and we have tutorial about the RCM process and everything start to finish on the wave dot engineer that you can access for free.
Noah Burk:Yeah, that's that's a great resource. It's only gonna improve, right? It's gonna give you a new way to look. One of the 1000 or a million waste is gonna cap. But there's a lot of other stuff because, like, the pm stuff that I got to be a part of it at Pipeline macros. Mark, great with macros. I'm nowhere near mark, but even being able to learn from him some of the small stuff, you know, I've been able to build little macros to take away, you know, little things that will drive you crazy, right? If you're on a computer for a long time and you're doing repetitive tasks like, Man, I can can get at you, but I highly recommend it. I've been gearing up to start taking the I believe it's three or four that you have to take before you can do your CSW. So I've been getting getting back in and studying things like surfacing stuff. I've not used that before, so things like weld mints and sheet metal, I've used that quite a bit, but some of the other stuff, like surfacing, I'll have to study it on pretty good Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I know when I see it on a resume. It always piques my interest. You know, it's a positive if I see that on someone's resume who's applying for a job here, I always think, oh, that's, that's nice to see. And you know, all else being equal, I would take the person who has that certification or the one who doesn't, because it does show a certain level of not just skill or capability, but but initiative as well. Yeah. Can you think of a time when your work directly contributed to improving either a product's performance or maybe even a user's experience with that product?
Noah Burk:Yeah, we had a project was a pipeline. It was a mechanism that kind of works, similar to a Kleenex box, and the customer had brought it to us. They said it was a prototype, but they had invested a lot of money into tooling, and the product wasn't functioning how they how they wanted it to and so I got assigned the product or project, and I looked at the product, and working with other engineers and interns, we developed a test, carried, oh, you know, designed a fixture To to do the test, carried out the test, analyzed the data. We were able to replace an off the shelf part, opposed to altering any of the injection molded parts that would allow this fancy Kleenex box. It wasn't for clean access for some other stuff, to actually dispense how it was originally intended. So what was probably a big worry for the customer of, oh man, I spent so much money on tooling, and we're our products, not where we need it to be. How much more money am I going to have to invest in changing that tooling before we can actually start selling these, because it's something we're proud to sell. So just switching out that little spring MADE IT function how it was originally intended. And I know the customer you know, had a big sigh of relief of to thank you so much, something so little, right? I don't even the spring cost was so negligible, right? When you're talking about changing tooling.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, right, yeah, I remember this project as well. All right. Well, let me take a short break here and share that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but. We do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. You can learn more at Team pipeline.us The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more at the wave dot engineer, and today we have the privilege of speaking with Mr. Noah Burke. Noah, can you share an experience where you had to troubleshoot a design issue during the manufacturing phase? So ideally, we work out all the kinks and bugs in the like design prototyping kind of R D stage. But you know, that's not always the case. And every now and then something slips through, which is normal and and expected to some degree. And so tell us what was the problem, and how did you resolve it, something that you had to troubleshoot during the manufacturing phase. Yeah, again,
Noah Burk:there's, there's more than one to choose from, because, like you mentioned, always something that sneaks through. One of the ones that I remember, it was a desktop fixture, and it was a remake of an old an old design. And so in this old design, they had only, there's knobs on this, on this device that they would load into the fixture. And originally they were only driving one of these knobs to test it out per cycle, and they would change to a new knob. And this new fixture had all five knobs driving at once. And so there was a lot going on. There was a motor per knob, you know, we looked at doing it mechanically, and it was cheaper to just go a motor per knob, and then working with the controls engineer to get all that functioning correctly. There was, you know, changes we had to make to the motors to get the correct motors in there. Originally, I had specked out motors that weren't the best for the application, so I had to make mechanical changes to the brackets then make sure all the belts are in there. Once that was going on controls, there was some problems with spinning, so we had to dive into it and see, is this a mechanical thing that's causing this issue, or controls thing? And so, you know, if it gets, you know, when you get in there, you can kind of get frustrated. You're like, oh, man, I was supposed to where i i thought i'd crossed all my T's out of all my eyes, and what's going on. And so it's, for me, it's important to take a breath. Okay, can we let's run a cycle, and let's just see and think about it. And then, you know, introduce some variable. Brandon, who was around kind of in my first half of when I was at Pipeline, he shared some great knowledge with me. Don't test with too many variable changes at once. Test, change one variable. Test because you change five variables and you don't know what fixed it. So that came in handy there, and we were able to pinpoint the problem and then fix it without any, you know, major redesigns. But that was one that sticks out to me.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's great advice. Don't change more than one variable at a time when you're troubleshooting, I've run into that myself, and I remember, long time ago I read a book about engineering or manufacturing. I can't remember exactly what the title of the book was, but there was this table in this book, and it talked about the cost of fixing a design flaw at different parts of the product development cycle, life cycle, so I don't remember. I'm going to mess this up a little bit, but you'll get the idea. So if you found design flaw. Early in the design phase, it was like 1x you know, like, just not, not a big deal if you found a flaw. Late in the design phase, it was like 10x if you found a flaw after parts had been manufactured and and you received them, it was like 100x and then if you found a design flaw once parts had shipped to the customer, then it was like 1,000x right? So it was like this increasing scale of magnitude every time or at each subsequent phase of a product development and launch cycle. And that always stuck with me. I. Just how much more expensive it gets the later in the design phase or the development phase that you identify these problems. So it might feel like an overkill to spend so much time during the design phase, the early phases of a development project to bring people in cross functional teams have all these eyes on it, but, man, it saves so much money if you spend a little bit more upfront and make sure it's right before going into production and shipping product out to customers.
Noah Burk:Yeah, totally agree.
Aaron Moncur:What are, what are some of the emerging or even maturing trends in in product design that you think engineers should be aware of, especially younger engineers.
Noah Burk:One of, yeah, one of the, kind of the most prominent, and I think even a lot of people know about it, right? It's 3d printing. And I tell especially the younger kids that I help teach a mentor, you got to pay attention to 3d printing, because there's a lot of money being spent in development. You know, I didn't get into it until three printers were pretty well developed. But I you know, you can look back on YouTube and see some of the probably 1015, years ago, the first 30 printers. And, you know, they were more of a tinker toy than a printing you know, reliable printing device was changing and adjusting settings and But thankfully, it's a lot of open source, right, and they've been able to develop that crazy fast where, now you have printers, you send it a file wirelessly. It's got a video camera on it so you can monitor it, and it's super fast. So you get what you designed, and you just go pop it off the bed, super easy, and you can put it together and test, you know, whatever you design, whether it's a mechanism or, you know, just a trinket that you design. So 3d printing is awesome, you know, I love to play around with your materials. Specifically in printing, they have, like, metal powders, and now they have metal printers where they're like, welding a bead around, you know, FDM metal printers and centering metal printers. And so right now, those are super expensive, but as the technology continues to grow, it's only gonna get cheaper. And now, you know, a lot of companies have FDM plastic dirty printers. It's pretty much the norm now, right? But 1015, years ago, they would have laughed at the idea of putting in a tinker toy right into their called it like, you know, way to get products out the door faster. Um, so that's, that's one of them that I'm definitely excited to see where it goes. But there's a lot of stuff that comes out pretty frequently, you know, seeing trade show videos and product demonstrations is awesome. LinkedIn is a great source. Scroll through there and you see some awesome stuff. I like to just, you know, every once while, when I hop on MasterCard, I just scroll around and see what new things they've added. I remember during my senior year in college, I had found this little detent, but instead of like a plunger detent, it was a directional detent. It kind of looked like a little balloon, and when you would push it one way, all it would try and do is return to center. And we were considering using it for our design, and I showed it to the senior design director. He's like, I've never seen that before. That's pretty cool. And how'd I find it? Just scrolling around on McMaster car and looking for, you know, whatever was out there. And, you know, McMaster cars, one automation, direct, Misumi. There's a lot of you know suppliers that you know, they're constantly looking for good things to add to their catalog. So as far as you know, scrolling down a couple lines sometimes you're, you know, reading a newsletter here and there to catch something new.
Aaron Moncur:Great advice. Great advice. One thing I always appreciated about you during your time here at Pipeline, was that you, you were, you always had some other project going on, like a personal project, and it often involved 3d printing. But I just, I loved seeing that your hobby was engineering as well, you know. And even within the context of your actual job here you you never, were never content to just do the minimum. You always went that extra step. Sometimes, like you mentioned, with you and Mark brainstorming, it led to spending, you know, a few more hours past the typical 40 hour. Work Week, but you always want that extra step. Always went that extra mile, and you were tenacious at finding solutions. Where do you think that that drive comes from? It? It seems to me that it was never to satisfy anyone else. It was never to like, oh, the optics of me working a few extra hours are good. So I'm gonna work a few extra hours. It seemed like it was more of an internal motivation. And I'm just curious, if you've ever thought about like, where does that drive come
Noah Burk:from? I think maybe I should spend some more time thinking about it, but I think I really chose the right path for me. You know, you hear stories of friends that went to college and they graduated college, and they don't like what they do at all. And I'm so far in the opposite direction, and I just feel so bad for people, you know, that struggle to find what they really like to do. And I really, I really, like, you know, do projects, right? Whether they're personal projects, it's personal project. I want to make the best thing possible for myself, right? A lot of things like, I use this a lot, you know, opposed to buying, you know, a cabinet off of Amazon or Wayfair. I would much rather spend double or triple the amount of money and buy the wood and make the cabinet myself, because you get to add, you know, your personal flair to it and design it just the way you want it. And then, you know, at work, you're doing a customer's project, but it's still your brain child, right? And you want it to be the best thing, right? You want to hear back from the customer and hear, I love to use this so much, and I can't wait for the next time we get to work with you and pipeline, you know, at the time. So that's what really drives me, is is, you know, building something I love for myself and build something that people love to use. Because, you know, if you just want to skate by and do the bare minimum, that's fine, right? You, you know, all the requirements are met. Customer gets it. How's it work? Well, it works fine. But, you know, we, you know, this is kind of floppy over here. It's not like the most robust thing, and this is kind of in the way, and we didn't notice at the time, but it does what it needs to do. It's okay. And I don't want, it's okay. I want, wow, that's pretty cool, and that's super nice and super slick. And, you know, you can tell that somebody took care and what they were doing and thought about it a little bit extra. And I think it's easy for me to do that, because I like it so much that it's like, you know, if you're driving home, I'll be listening to music or listen to a podcast. And, oh, how could I make that better? And it's not like a, you know, nagging, because, you know, your brain is like reminding you, oh, you know, because of immense work pressure, that you need to get this done, and if you don't get it done, you're going to be on the frying pan, though it's a, oh, well, you know, my brain's kind of not thinking about much, and all of a sudden, what if I tried doing that? Could that be better? And just playing around with those ideas I find to be great. So
Aaron Moncur:Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that you chose the right path for for you right? And you just love doing this stuff so it doesn't feel like work. It's just, it's recreation, it's play. It's something to tickle your brain. Love it. Any advice that you would give to young engineers who are interested in entering the field of product design and development. Yeah,
Noah Burk:learn CAD and use it to do all the things. So a lot of like, like I mentioned about companies with you printers. A whole lot of schools have 3d printers now too. And you know, I would be willing to wager it that a lot of things that get printed on those printers are probably from thing averse. Your printables just downloaded files, which are, you know, they're fun, they're good. But you know to get onto a site like onshape, where you can get a free trial, and YouTube and the internet is at your fingertips, and you can find so much stuff, so starting to build those building blocks early. You know, as as early as high school. Recently, I've been a personal robotics mentor out at Jackson area Career Center, and they use SolidWorks all the time, and there's kids that are really, really good. Hit SolidWorks, and it's, it's great to see. You know, they're, they're, when I, when I started my first job, I thought I was going to be the young guy, but all these old people wouldn't know what they were doing. And I got put in my place very quick. I was like, Oh man, I thought extremely wrong. And these people are, you know, two, 3x where I started at, so they're starting to, you know, learn that stuff. But the earlier you can learn it, the better, because you'll get better at seeing, you know, places to use it. And doing the personal projects has helped me out a ton doing crazy designs just for fun, because it's fun, right? So the earlier you're able to do that, the better. And then you'll be able to implement your designs faster. You'll be able to think of crazier things to design being you know, creative is another, another part of it, and that one's a little bit harder to kind of teach, or, I'm sure there's YouTube videos about it too. But, you know, kind of merging your creativity with practical things like CAD so you can bring your creativity to life. You know, the more refs you get doing that, the better you're going to be. So I, I have a lot of hope for this younger generation, because they have a lot of tools at their fingertips now, and I probably had a good amount of them that I, you know, didn't get interested in until late in high school. But now you know, things are available elementary school, even middle school kids, and they're getting to look at it, and hopefully that sparks that interest even earlier so they can get much better than me. There's, there's a lot of people out there that I'm sure are much, much better than me, and there are a lot of people who will be but the earlier you get the you know, the higher
Aaron Moncur:you can soar. Have you heard about this? It's a new it's a startup called back flip. I think it's backflip.ai. You would, you would, I think you would get into this company. You should go check them out. Backflip.ai, it's, it's aI CAD modeling. So you give it a text prompt, and it creates a 3d CAD model. And I think the output is STL, I don't know. I don't know what their, you know, their trajectory is, if they just want to help people, you know, put things on Thingiverse or something, or if they intend for this to become a serious engineering tool, but just the, I mean, we've all thought about it right with the rise of AI. How is that going to change or affect engineering? So anyway, it's an interesting company that people might people might want to check out. I think they're pretty early right now and what they have, but be super interesting to see how how their product matures over time. Yeah,
Noah Burk:I'm definitely gonna check that out. I was looking into, I heard like you could put large language or AI locally on your computer. And I was like, Oh, what is that? I gotta learn that. Because, you know, how can I get it to watch me and train my own AI to do bad stuff, right? Like drawings. That'd be great.
Aaron Moncur:That would be great once AI can do drawings for us, which it's probably going to happen. I'm sure there are people out there working on that right now. All right, Noah, well, one more question, and then we'll wrap things up. What is one thing that you have done to accelerate the speed of engineering? Yeah,
Noah Burk:so it's counter a little bit counter intuitive, to accelerate, right? Is not always working faster and getting a more developed first go at it. Sometimes it's working a little bit slower, taking that extra thought and then also using your coworkers and the people around you to bounce ideas off of fresh eyes. Man, they are worth their weight in gold. I constantly I'll send Hey, you come take a look at this. What do you think of this? Can I do this better? They're like, Oh, I don't even know what this is, but why are you doing it that way instead of maybe, like, this way, huh? I didn't even think about that. Then you get to chew on that for a little bit, and maybe that's better, right? So fresh eyes and a little bit back and forth. Now, that doesn't mean like, a whole 30 hour minute, sit down, meeting right? It could just be like, oh, so and so is walking by. I'm going to grab them real quick. Hey, check this out for five minute. Little conversation that can totally open you up, because I've done it time and time again, where I'm locked in and I stared at CAD models for a week or two weeks, and I. Somebody just says, Well, look at over there. Why is it that way? I'm like, that's been there the whole time, and I haven't seen it. So that's a big one of not trying to go too fast, too quick. Because in CAD, as I'm sure a lot of people that use CAD know, when you get really, really developed, and your assemblies get a ton of parts in them. You make one change to one part, and there's waterfall effects that could go, you know, it could only be one part, if you're lucky, you know, two part change. If you're lucky, it could be three, four assemblies need to change because the parts use all over the place. And so getting a really blocky thing done at first. It's easily adjustable, and then locking that down and taking those baby steps is crucial, right? You want to be the fastest, right? And you want to say, oh, man, I can get this long project done in a couple weeks, and I'm just going to show up to the 25% Designer view with this totally detailed and they're gonna be Wow, and they'll do that a little bit, and then they'll say something like, well, why'd you do it that way? Maybe we could change that a little bit. You know? Yeah, we could change that definitely. I totally understand why it's better. All of a sudden, you're changing 15 parts and updating 15 drawings, and you're pulling your hair out like, Oh, why did I do this. So learning that kind of, you know, cruising altitude that you're comfortable with, and over time, as you as you cruise, you find it you can start building up slowly. But I definitely made the mistake of jumping too far and just doing this a lot of times. So finding a good cruise point, and knowing your optimal speed, and then slowly working to build that up, because you'll you'll catch yourself kind of asking those same questions that other people ask you, like, well, it's like this now, but what if I flipped it? What if I put it over here, or put it upside down, you know, the little things like that. And so you'll think about them ahead of time. You say, Yep, this is why I want it like this and not that way. And so you, you know, grab somebody that's walking by, and they look at it and they ask you, why'd you do why didn't you do this way? XYZ? They're like, yep, that makes sense. So finding a good cruising altitude is gonna it can help you keep your hair for longer, pulling it out.
Aaron Moncur:I think that's a really important lesson. And I've, I've seen more times than I care to count when exactly the situation you discussed develops where an engineer shows up to what's supposed to be like, really high level concept design review, and they've got all the details in there, right? They've got all the edge radii and chamfers, and they've got hardware everywhere. And you're like, oh man. I mean, maybe at one point I thought it was cool, because, oh, wow, it's all done right, but, but I've seen this enough times now to where, when I see that, I'm like, oh, no, we just spent way too much time doing this level of of design. Because inevitably, it's not going to be right, right? This is, like, early stage conceptual stuff, and it's never right the first time. That's nobody's fault. It's just never right the first time. And it's part of the process. So not going too far, too soon. And then you mentioned getting advice from other people. Have other people look at your design. That's that's huge. We don't need to do this by ourselves. We most of the time, we shouldn't be doing this ourselves. It's not efficient to try and do a complete design just by yourself. You should have someone else looking at it regularly, pointing things out. Why is it like that? Why shouldn't we do it like this? So great answers, great answers. Noah, what a delight has been to catch up with you. It's so nice to see your face and and hear your voice. How can people get in touch with you?
Noah Burk:LinkedIn? No work on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way. Don't have a ton of social media, so LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me. Love to connect and start growing my network. That's something that I should have rubbed off on me more, on my time, on pipeline, you know, knowing a lot of people and having a lot of followers on LinkedIn, you see that kind of cool stuff that everybody's doing. That's another thing. Hey, I've had in the sand, right? Just stay in your industry and only seeing things in your industry. It's cool to see things from other industries. There's examples of pipeline where we've taken ideas from one industry and morphed into a mechanism that'll work for another one. So yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. Love to see all the cool stuff you guys are doing.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Yeah, awesome. And we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Okay, well, to wrap things up here, we're going to continue a trend and share a review that one of you, dear listeners sent to us. Highly encouraged. I would love to get more interaction with users, with listeners. So if you have a suggestion for a guest or a topic that you'd like to hear, please send it over. You can find me on on LinkedIn as well. Just send me a message there. You can comment on one of the podcast posts that we've done on LinkedIn every week we post about the most recent episode that was released, and you can just comment there, or you can find me directly on LinkedIn and send me a message. But this the review that we're going to read today is from Lewis D and it says, just have to mention that I've listened to your podcast for a while now, it convinced me to apply for an engineering program and start that career path within my company. Thanks for all of the time and effort you put into it well. Thank you, Louis. We appreciate the the comment, the review, and thrilled that it helped you make a choice that hopefully benefits your life. And I think that's it for today, so we'll wrap things up here. Noah, thanks again for being on the show.
Noah Burk:Thank you so much, Aaron, for having me.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
