techauthorbob wrote:....
It's been interesting finding out what everything weighs, some info easy to find but some really difficult.
..
Bob
If I may digress slightly with, I hope, an interesting story to do with the weight of things ?
Many lifetimes ago I was selling workflow and imaging systems and Brown and Root were interested in the feasibility in their design office for oil platforms and invited me down to have a look at what they did and suggest any improvements that workflow and imaging might give them.
Each of the many specialists had an In and an Out tray - individually barcoded. Throughout the day, work packages would arrive and be barcoded and logged into their In Tray. They had a finite time to turn around the work package as it would be barcoded and logged from their Out Tray and woe betide anyone who were late at the end of the timeslot as the barcode logging system produced the Report. Stressful? You bet. But it gets even better.
Often the basic design concept would be done by the sales engineer on the back of a fag packet over lunch with the client. So as the design proper progressed, you'd get X-Ray metallurgy coming back to the fabrication team saying that they couldn't make Tank X of this or that shape as they couldn't test the thickness properly and so the tank would need to be a different shape. Which meant that the pipes that had been planned to go one way now had to be moved to go another way to miss the revised tank dimensions. And so round the houses they'd go again..redesigning etc. Barcoding in and out.
And the crux of the story ? Every single item had its weight and the co-ordinates as to where in the oil platform it was located. These details were then input into a spreadsheet. The output of the spreadsheet was a single diagram that had an outline in the shape of a Maltese Cross. That was the Centre of Gravity envelope and provided the big X plotted by Excel was within it then everything was hunky-dory. If it wasn't then round and round they went again.
Told them that our system wasn't suitable !
If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.