That >8,000 lb. winch is a waste of money.

Q: How do you confuse an engineer?

A: Give them the thing they just designed, and ask them to use it.

My best friend is an engineer and loves this joke, because he sees it everyday. If you've designed something that maximizes efficiency, but doesn't take into consideration production, budget, practicality, and other design constraints, it's useless. As has been demonstrated with this thread.

I would trust an old codger with no engineering degree who has many years of field experience over an engineering student, or even a professional engineer any day of the week. At least when we're talking about off-road recovery.

I'm always reminded of that Punkin Chunkin' show that was on Discovery Channel. There was this team of engineers (from MIT iirc) that had this small compact design that, if I'm being honest, was rather elegant and powerful. You know what kept beating it? The farmer dude with a big-ass trebuchet. Was it efficient? No. But it chucked pumpkins really really far, and didn't have 400 moving parts.

 

It's those old "farm" dudes that invented and made a lot of what we take for granted today. But these new kids on the block don't study the old timers and simplicity of things.

 

There's a time and place for both, for sure.

Ideally, you want someone who can run the equations, calculate the dynamic loads, etc... but also knows when the most practical solution is just a big ass chunk of steel.

 

I'd narrow it down to shitty engineers that would be confused in that joke, the ones who can't get their nose out of a textbook. Good engineers take things into account and can build things so easy to use that the end user may not even realize just how complicated of a problem the widget just solved. I know shitting on engineers is fun and popular, but there's more to it than people see.

 

Engineer jokes are over played.

 

A bit. They're totally deserved sometimes, but often completely miss the bigger picture.


I just hope the engineer who designed the ATV winch was on his game that day

 

Well yeah, of course. That's what makes it a joke. Like jokes about cops and donuts, or jokes about quad riders with mullets.

I spent 3 years as an engineering student (before I realized I'd rather stare at rocks instead) and the mantra for sure was "run these equations and maximize your efficiency etc... The most beneficial class I had was in the machine shop. We'd spend all this time designing these parts that were "perfect" only to find out from the lead machinist there's no way to actually manufacture that part, or that you could effectively do the same thing with far fewer moving parts.

My best friend who's an engineer spends a non-trival amount of his time telling some of the more junior engineers that while that's a great technical design, it's not what the customer asked for.

 

I’m sure the vid isn’t actually OP, BUT much much earlier in the thread OP did talk about “using whatever is around” and mentioned throwing 10year old (if I remember correctly) in his recovery bag haha.

 

True!

As much as engineering students like to think otherwise, they don't walk out of engineering school as engineers. They've got the basic skills and the math at that point, but they still have so much learning to do in order to be an effective engineer, which is where that machining course fits - practical application. They cram a ton of book learning into an engineering degree, but there's very little time for practical application, and its not until they've had some time in their field, working under experienced mentors, that they get that.

 

Is that not the case for most professions and skills? The biggest difference I see that engineering is a generic field. You could pretty get a job designing almost anything. You aren't going to learn everything there is to know about every product in the world in the few years of school.

Not to mention all the politics of designing a product that happens. People think engineers have the first and last say in what gets designed. In reality we are closer to the bottom of the list. It would be like blaming the guy installing insulation in the walls of your new house for not picking insulation with a higher R-value. He's just the dude installing it. He didn't pick the shitty insulation because the mega national builder wanted to make more money on that track of houses. He's just trying to do the best he can with the shitty insulation he was given. Except it's actually worse than that because as an engineer you are evaluated on whether you can continuously make shit cheaper on continuously tighter schedules. Every time you succeed, the cost target gets smaller and the time frame to complete it get shorter until you are design shit out of paper mache in an hour.

Edit: Actually I bet the insulation guy feels the same way. He's probably pressured to go faster to make the company more money.

 

Yep, agreed. School is just the beginning for a lot of professions.

for the second part, it really depends on the company. Some of them have absoutely shit culture and management that grinds people, others are far better to work for.

 

Yeah, I didn't think it was the OP either. Whoever it was... yikes.

Given that the OP thinks using an ATV winch is a perfectly acceptable thing to do under normal circumstances (using 9 snatch blocks, of course), I have my doubts he's capable of making a sound judgement as to what is safe and acceptable to improvise with in an emergency.

There's a difference between using anything and everything at your disposal, and recognizing if those things will actually help the situation, or potentially make it worse. Sure, use what's around you to improvise with if you are caught in an unforeseen situation, but if you're *planning* out your recovery gear bag, why the hell would you even consider throwing a climbing rope in there (especially an old one)? I got a roll of duct tape, but I'm not going to use it to repair a broken winch cable, lol.

When you combine the breaking strength (~5500#) and the stretch (40%) under the weight of a person (let alone a 5000# vehicle), I'm not sure I'd ever even *think* of even trying to use a climbing rope in a recovery. Even "static" climbing ropes still stretch, just not as much.

 

In my experience, it seems to be tied to the industry as well. If you are making consumer products, it tends to have thin margin and the markets reward a race to the cheapest product possible. If you are working for a government contractor on a cost plus contract, it will be totally different. The company gets paid a fixed profit (mostly) that's been predetermined off a conservative estimate of the job. But again, I think our general discussion (and where most people have experience with products and how many of these jokes start) is through consumer goods.

 

Winch lines stretch too.

 

Yeah. I've never worked consumer goods, thankfully. I imagine its a lot like retail sales. Closest I've done was scientific instruments, which would have been great but the management was not so great. I'm back in a business-to-business industry now and its waaaay better.

 

Absolutely true. The engineering friends I have who all have very different careers. Of the two that were in my wedding party, one's a dentist (though he designed gas station roof structures before he got burnt out), and another works for a firm that does State contract HVAC design.

I think the problem is that the schooling doesn't necessarily give us the knowledge that we DON'T know everything. We commonly come out of school thinking we're hot shit because we graduated with honors or whatever.

I know that when I graduated with a geology and geophysics degree, I thought I was pretty cool, but come to find out that very little of my schooling *really* prepared me for my job. And my job title (geophysicist) couldn't be more related to my degree, lol.

That's kind of a long standing gripe I've had with the education system. Starting way back in high school there are 2 tracks you take: Vocational or academic. I was on the academic track, at least as far as my formal education, but in the end, we're ALL looking for jobs in the real world.

 

Snatch straps do too, by design.

But not 40% stretch like a climbing rope, and they're designed to stretch under the weight of a vehicle.

 

Little to close to Home??

 

I guess the snowflake in me came out. I prefer discussing ATV riders’ mullets.

 

Don't ever step foot in a mechanic's shop they cuss an engineer every 5 seconds