Understanding engineers

and purchasing is primarily concerned with component cost. The engineer must not only create the best design possible but also balance these conflicting requirements.

Coupled with this tribal environment is the fact that engineers fundamentally think and communicate differentially. We live in a very black and white world with hard specifications and physical laws of nature. This is in direct contrast to the business world, which has many shades of gray. As a result engineers rarely ascend to decision-making positions.

You have likely experienced this in your shop, you ask for a particular product to be stocked and another is ordered. You are sure a certain product should be displayed on a showroom motorcycle, but it is not. You may feel your opinions are not valued, and you are not alone.

Even Honda, one of the best high-quality manufacturers in the world, has suffered from this. For example, in 1984 VF750 camshafts began to fail in large numbers. After a great deal of research and a few wrong conclusions, the cause was traced to the cam bearing towers' manufacturing method.

Instead of boring the assembly as a unit the heads and cam covers were machined on different machines. The manufacturing tolerance or variation using this method was too great, and as a result, many motorcycles had bearing problems.

We will never know what happened inside Honda, but I am willing to wager the root cause was a breakdown in communication between two or more departments.

The powersports industry is not alone, as illustrated in some examples from my career as a design engineer.

.While working on the water fountains in the front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, I was developing a shield to allow a submerged nozzle to be fired while maintaining a desired "shot" shape. All my tests on the initial design concept were failures, and I believed the problems could not be solved with the allotted time and budget. I prepared a presentation to convince the company owner to develop another concept, but at the meeting my newly hired boss, who had never seen the prototype much less a test, convinced the owner that it could be done with his superior presentation skills. Against my objections, I was ordered not only to proceed but also to cease all activity on alternate designs.

The result of this choice was $200,000 in useless parts not including the cost of installation, field rework, and removal of the faulty design-all in plain sight of the client. A design based on my original recommendations was ultimately used. To my superior's credit, no blame was ever placed on me regarding the disaster.

During my stint with a large domestic manufacturer of CNC vertical machining centers, the lead engineer on a project was almost never invited to the design reviews. Sometimes fundamental changes would be made without any engineering review.