At the weekend you will often find me busy on various projects in the Sanstec workshop, catching up on those long overdue tasks that I have been unable to fulfil during the so-called five day working week. Recently I have been making repairs to a 2009 Mk2 Ford Focus Zetec that I have owned for a number of years now. The top of the car’s engine lay in a number of bits around me as part of changing the cam belt. The instructions in my trusty manual simply said “remove the crankshaft pulley nut” but try as I might, and with my compressor turned up as high as it would go, it just wouldn’t budge. This is a prime example of a fairly straightforward mechanical engineering job that should take half the time, but in this instance I spent at least double the time allocated trying to remove the pesky nut.
This predicament is similar to that recently experienced in the Sanstec office working on CAD design drawings for a client. I was asked to make a refinement to a design that we had been working on; surely a straightforward request for a CAD design engineer, I hear you say! However, in this instance, a simple adjustment in a not to be named CAD software programme, took a lot longer than it really should have done. Incidentally, this issue was not down to my CAD design skills, but having to work around how the software operates and allows you to make technical changes to complex assemblies containing numerous parts. This in itself being a bit of a challenge requiring that I had to subsequently readjust client expectations and our internal project management calendar.
Returning to the story about the nut, a friend of mine who works in the motor trade, has since suggested that it's time I apply some heat to the area. I am really hoping that when I return to the workshop at the weekend, this treatment is successful, otherwise I will have wasted a lot of time and effort on a tough nut to crack.
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