On Sunday, April 02, 2000 7:49 PM Michael S. Lorrey retroman@turbont.net
wrote:
> I've found that while the device drawings would be to spec and as made,
> its the manufacturing drawings that would frequently not be updated with
> the little quirks and workarounds that people on the manufacturing floor
> come up with to either do their jobs better, faster, or to work around a
> manufacturing defect that was not forseen in 2d drawings. Till my father
> came to work at Ruger, engineering by word of mouth on the manufacturing
> floor, without documentation, tended to be the regular MO.
Sad but true in a lot of places, but I still think this would be easier to
do than making a whole new launch system.
> > I suspect a more likely explanation is that no one awarded a contract
> > to preserve the drawings and so North American Rockwell, et. al. didnt.
> > Anybody know? spike
>
> The only engineering departments I have dealt with were rather small to
> middlin, so I can't presume to understand the scope of storing the
> engineering drawings for the most complex machine ever built to that
> date, however I don't know of any engineers that would not keep archives
> of all of their prior work, even if just on microfilm, although I
> understand that Lockheed used to regularly destroy many drawings of
> classified programs as a security measure, which perplexed the USAF to
> no end.
Maybe an FOIA search might uncover something???
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:18 MDT