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Exact Constraint to the Rescue!
A client recently requested a repeatable positioning device for a bio-medical system. Normally, this is a ‘turn the crank’ design, where the biggest challenge is sorting through previously-used...
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Spring(s)!
Spring is in the air! The fruit trees are blooming in the back yard and the fresh breeze is coming in gently from the newly opened windows. With all that going on it’s hard for an engineer to keep...
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Spot-It – How’d they do that!?
During the holidays, you might have heard of the popular party game called Spot-It. The goal is to match certain elements on two different cards as fast as possible. It’s a great game for all ages and...
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Friction Factor Calculation in Excel
Happy 4th of July Everybody! When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to calculate the Darcy-Weisbach friction factor… engineer’s often throw up their hands, go back to their old college...
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Excel Belleville Spring Calculator
Belleville Springs (aka “Belleville Washers”, “Spring Washers”, or “Disk Springs”) are wonderfully useful mechanical devices, but with one minor drawback – their properties are difficult to calculate –...
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Error Trapping in Excel: How to use NA() to make your Excel chart pretty!
If you’ve ever used Excel to present data with ‘holes’ in it, you might have been frustrated by the options for how those holes should be represented on a chart. Here’s a short summary of one way to...
View ArticleSpring Animation in SolidWorks
Animating a Spring in SolidWorks can be tricky. Here’s one way to accomplish it. The ZIP file linked below contains native SolidWorks files (SW 2014) for you to download and try it yourself. Spring...
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Platonic Solids in SOLIDWORKS
A recent video from my favorite YouTube channel (Numberphile – see the video below) started me thinking about modeling the Platonic Solids in SOLIDWORKS again. I have seen demonstrations of several...
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