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Archive for April 14th, 2009

I’ve been out of action for several days, suffering from what may seem like an awful case of conjunctivitis, or extremely dry eye, most likely related to the presence (and recent growth) of scar tissue on my cornea as a result of a chemical burn I suffered a few years ago while working with strain gauges. It feels worse than it sounds, believe me!  It also comes and goes, never lasts more than a few days and then I’m fine again, but you can bet I’m not precisely fun to be with while it lasts, because during those days I can’t even stand the light and it certainly feels as if I had rubbed chili peppers on my eyeballs. Today I’m feeling much better, and I’m thankful that my husband recorded for me a new show from the Discovery Channel that I was curious about: Doing Da Vinci.  

Have you seen that show? I find it very interesting. Basically, you have a team of guys who are experts at building all kinds of stuff and gadgets (think gadgets for special effects in movies and such) trying to bring Leonardo’s never before built designs of war machines to life.  So it goes like this: Dr. Pevsner, who has devoted a great deal of his life to studying Da Vinci’s work, challenges the team with a particular machine and also provides the sketches and information about the design as they appear in Leonardo’s notes. Next, the engineer of the team takes the sketches and information available and creates a 3D model (using Autodesk Inventor), blueprints and instructions for the rest of the crew to actually build and assemble Leonardo’s invention. Of course, it’s not that easy…  For instance, they try to keep the selection of materials as close as possible to what Leonardo would’ve used to build the prototype of his invention, but they still have to make choices along the way, and facilitate their work by using machines that Leonardo probably didn’t have laying around in his shop, but that he may have liked had they been available back then.  In the episode I watched, for instance, the engineer decided on adding ball bearings to Leonardo’s design of a war tank, even though most of us are almost sure they didn’t actually exist back then, but Dr. Pevsner justified his choice by arguing (with pictures and all) that Leonardo may have actually invented the very first bearings way back then.  Of course, when later on  they brought in the CNC machine  after the engineer managed to break the blade of the saw they were previously using (why is it always the engineer that breaks things?), my husband and I joked that it was probably a valid choice because it was likely that Leonardo invented the CNC mill, as well.

Jokes aside, I find this show extremely interesting because it’s not precisely a show about design, like in the case of Prototype This, but about what happens after the design phase is complete. See, the design phase already took place hundreds of years ago, and this is now about how to take that design and make it a reality, and it’s interesting because this is precisely what a great deal of people that work with SolidWorks and other 3D modeling software need to figure out every day. While it’s true that a few will be actually inventing something new for a living, most will be working on bringing someone else’s idea to life, just like the engineer in the show, creating the 3D model out of Da Vinci’s sketches and notes, and pouring out of his own experience and common sense in selecting materials and making a few adaptations to it while staying as close as possible to the original design.

Some time ago I had asked another SolidWorks blogger who has his own business and who usually works with inventors and other particulars doing precisely that, if he could write about it, about what he does for his clients, about the process involved and what part he plays in it, and he told me there was not much to say about it, that sometimes there were sketches, sometimes just a few doodles on a napkin, not much to say about it…  I think there is a lot more to say about it. While it may not seem very romantic for some, because there’s not actual design taking place here, it’s interesting just the same, perhaps even more so because it involves reality and that’s precisely what I think is sometimes missing for many of us engineers: the bridge between the idea, the design, and the world of reality, of what’s practical, of what can really be built and what it will take to do it. Of course, in this case it is even better because it’s not just any design, it’s Leonardo Da Vinci’s!  Great show, I still wish they had chosen SolidWorks for their solid modeling, though…  J