In a capitalist society, the way things usually work is that government
and academia focus on research and
development, while industry focuses
on commercialization. The result
is an increasingly wide disconnect in
the applied research sector, which deals
primarily with technology development
and demonstration.
It's Monday morning, December
15, 2036. An autonomous vehicle
drops off two engineers in front of a gear manufacturing facility in Metro Detroit. They punch in for work on their wristwatches and pay Uber for the ride on a smartphone. One of the engineers begins walking the shop floor, monitoring a series of collaborative robots using a tablet
the size of a paperback novel. These
robots interact right on the floor with
the minimal staff scheduled to oversee
manufacturing operations. Another
engineer wears an interactive headset
and begins training a group of new engineers (in real time) from China using some form of augmented reality.
While the two have taught a variety of AGMA courses over
the years, without question their most popular courses are
Gear Failure Analysis (Errichello with longtime colleague Jane
Muller) and Gearbox CSI: Forensic Analysis of Gear & Bearing
Failures (Drago). Drago currently teaches Manufacturing &
Inspection (with AGMA instructor Joseph W. Lenski, Jr.) and
Gearbox System Design: The Rest of the Story - Everything but
the Gears and Bearings (with AGMA instructor Steve Cymbala)
as well.
There's no substitute for a good
software package in gear manufacturing.
It's a critical shop floor tool
that provides practical engineering services
that customers appreciate. When
you're in the business of specifying and
procuring high quality gears, the software
needs to meet many objectives including
the consideration of all tolerances of
center distance, tooth thickness and tip
diameters, root diameters, fillets, etc. It's
also imperative that the software updates
include the latest revisions to the gear
standards being used in the industry.
During a year with a strong
dollar, tanked oil prices and a
number of soft markets that
just aren't buying, one might
expect spline manufacturers
to be experiencing the same
tumult everyone else is. But when
I got a chance to speak with some of
the suppliers to spline manufacturers at
IMTS about how business is going, many
of the manufacturing industry's recent
woes never came up, and instead were
replaced by a shrug and an "eh, business
is doing pretty well."