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During more than 20 years in my prior role, I attracted a ‘reputation’ (equal parts praise and ridicule) for attacking many machinery problems using only a “stopwatch and a cardboard box”.  In typical Aussie fashion, it became an overused starting point for regular banter – “Wow! That’s an interesting problem.  Wait…, I bet Russ proposes…

How often have you heard the expression “water is incompressible”? No matter how often, it’s never been correct; nothing is incompressible (with the possible exception of subatomic particles, but let’s not get bogged down in theoretical physics). Of course, much folklore often contains an element of truth – water is in fact very stiff! Indeed,…

I spent 25 years working for a world leader in large-scale flood modelling.  In true Aussie fashion, jovial belittlement of each other’s passion drove part of the company’s continuous improvement.  The ongoing one-upmanship produced a stream (pun intended) of world-class products.  Being part of the mechanical engineering team, one of my favorite quips about flood modelling…

Waiting for a break in the workload to write this post has proven futile. So at the risk of delaying project delivery an hour or 3, I thought I’d get this one published before all continuity is lost. Rules of thumb for welds and bolts are OK, but what about more substantial structural members? Many…

This post was written during flights home from a project in central Queensland. Maybe I need to travel more often in order to publish at a more useful rate. The previous 2 rules of thumb focused on strength, estimating the safe capacities of common design details in tonnes. This post takes a brief diversion to…

Good grief! Is that the time already? This post is way overdue. I’m guessing I might have applied the rule of thumb from my previous post maybe 5 – 10 times during the last month or so.  What about you? I hope you get as much value from it as I have over the last…

Hello interweb!  Welcome to the first ever blog post for Quantise!    The aim is to share easily digestible engineering tidbits acquired over the last 3 decades, and with your participation and comments, build on these for the benefit of all visitors. My chief activities over the last 30 years have been in machine test &…