Engineering↗
SOLIDWORKS Templates, Sheet Formats & Custom Properties
Governing the SOLIDWORKS template set: what templates carry versus system options, why sheet formats are separate artefacts, designing a custom property schema before the first …
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Engineering
Engineering articles and subject areas in the KEVOS knowledge library. 1397 pages.
All Engineering 1397Civil & Structural 21Mechanical 201Electrical 16Engineering Mathematics 1073Computing & Software 20Manufacturing 66
Engineering↗
SOLIDWORKS Toolbox & Design Library Governance
Controlling shared component libraries in SOLIDWORKS: where the Toolbox should live, configuring numbering and naming before production use, permissions and the silent-write fai…
Engineering↗
SOLIDWORKS Upgrade Planning & Version Compatibility
Planning a SOLIDWORKS upgrade: the four compatibility rules that govern sequencing, deciding when to adopt, pre-upgrade validation, the server-side sequence, and where rollback …
Engineering↗
SOLIDWORKS Workstation Specification & Hardware Certification
How to specify engineering workstations for SOLIDWORKS: why single-thread frequency governs rebuild performance, how to size memory against assembly scale, and why graphics supp…
Engineering↗
Spanning the Gap: The Iron Bridge, the Truss and the Suspension Chain
Three milestones in which metal replaces masonry as the primary structural material, and in which someone tests it before building with it.
Engineering↗
Spur and Helical Gear Fundamentals
Gear fundamentals for mechanical design: velocity ratio, hunting teeth, module and tooth proportions, involute profile and pressure angle, face width rules, and tangential, sepa…
Engineering↗
Steam Afloat and on Rails: Wilkinson, Trevithick, Fulton and Rainhill
Four milestones in which the compact high-pressure engine and the iron hull between them end the age in which transport meant wind, water and muscle.
Engineering↗
Steel Beyond Bessemer: Regenerative Heat, the Basic Process and Alloy Steels
Four milestones showing a field that acquired chemistry rather than physics, and in which the decisive advance came from a part-time experimenter working in a cellar.
Engineering↗
Stopping a Train: The Air Brake and Fail-Safe Design
Three milestones producing the clearest example of fail-safe design anywhere in this set: a brake that applies itself when its own control system fails.
Engineering↗
Storing Energy: The Lithium-Ion Cell, Hybrid Traction and Grid-Scale Batteries
Three milestones that made stored electricity dense enough to move a vehicle, then fast enough and cheap enough to stabilise a grid.
Engineering↗
Telegraphy: The First Electrical Industry
Four milestones in the first industry assembled deliberately out of laboratory physics, and the first to design against a transmission medium that could not be inspected.
Engineering↗
The Age of Applied Science: How Engineering Learned to Use Science
A structured reference series tracing how engineering stopped learning only from experience and began deriving results from science, with electrical engineering as the paradigm …
Engineering↗
The American System: Interchangeable Parts, Assembly Lines and the Sewing Machine
Interchangeable manufacture and the lockstitch sewing machine replaced skilled fitting with repeatable process, moving the engineering effort from the product to the system that…
Engineering↗
The Engineering Profession: Competence, Registration and the Duty of Care
Statutory engineer registration began in 1907, the year the Quebec Bridge fell. How the four-pillar competence model works and what it requires of Australian engineers today.
Engineering↗
The First Practical Motor Car: Benz and the Features That Stuck
Three milestones, and an unusually clean case of a first design getting the architecture right, plus a patent case worth knowing.
Engineering↗
The Gothic Structural System: Ribbed Vault, Pointed Arch and Flying Buttress
Four milestones in which builders working without any theory of statics arrived, by observation and by failure, at a structural system of remarkable efficiency.
Engineering↗
The Greek Contribution: Abstract Geometry, Mechanics and the First Machines
Six milestones including the single most consequential idea in the whole set: that there are general laws and that they can be known.
Engineering↗
The Grid: Large-Scale Generation, Transmission and Interconnection
Interconnection turned separate power stations into one synchronised machine spanning a country, buying shared reserve and merit order dispatch at the price of propagating faults.
Engineering↗
The Iron and Steel Ship: Cellular Hulls and the Great Eastern
Three milestones in which a ship stopped being a shaped assembly of timbers and became a designed structure with a calculated stress distribution.
Engineering↗
The Medieval Power Revolution: Water, Wind and the Horse
Six milestones that together constitute the largest single change in this set: the replacement of human muscle as the primary source of mechanical power.
Engineering↗
The Petroleum Value Chain: From the First Oil Well to the Modern Refinery
A cased, drilled well and fractional distillation created an industry in two years. How well construction, barrier philosophy and refinery architecture actually work.
Engineering↗
The Programmable Machine: The Microprocessor, Flash Memory and Lithography Scaling
Three milestones that made computation a component rather than a facility, gave it persistent storage, and kept both getting cheaper for five decades.
Engineering↗
The Solid-State Revolution: The Transistor, the Integrated Circuit and the First Network
Three milestones that replaced the vacuum tube, removed the wiring between components, and then removed the assumption that computers must be connected point to point.
Engineering↗
The SOLIDWORKS Administrative Image
Creating and maintaining a SOLIDWORKS administrative image: image types, the option editor and its configuration scopes, path constraints that cause obscure failures, and the ma…
Engineering↗
Traversing SolidWorks Assemblies and Feature Trees
Recursive component traversal through configurations and root components, walking the feature and sub-feature chain, filtering by type name, reading suppression states and repor…
Engineering↗
Untethered: Digital Mobile Telephony, Satellite Positioning and the Smartphone
Three milestones that separated communication from place, made position and precise time a free service, and folded a dozen devices into one.
Engineering↗
Urban Water Engineering: Treatment, Sewerage and Elevated Storage
Three milestones between 1854 and 1860 established the modern urban water system: treat what comes in, separate and treat what goes out, and store enough head to survive a failure.
Engineering↗
Vee and Wedge Belt Drive Design
Designing a wedge belt drive: belt types, service factors, section selection, pulley pitch diameters, belt pitch length, exact centre distance, correction factors and the number…
Engineering↗
Water and Mud: Irrigation, Flood Control and the First Engineered Cities
Engineering begins as a response to water. Four milestones in levees, canals, urban drainage and bringing supply inside the walls.
Engineering↗
Water, Concrete and Scale: The Panama Canal, Hoover Dam and Prestressed Concrete
Three milestones showing what happens when concrete construction moves from large to unprecedented, and the governing parameter turns out to be hydrology, creep or heat rather t…
Engineering↗
Welded Joint Design
Designing butt and fillet welded joints: full penetration assumptions, leg length against throat thickness, allowable stress, and the weld-as-a-line method for direct, bending a…
Engineering↗
Working with Selected Objects in the SolidWorks API
Using the SOLIDWORKS selection manager: marks and ordering, identifying picked entities, adding mates, setting materials, driving dimension values, programmatic selection and se…
Engineering↗
Worm Gearboxes and Geared Motor Units
Selecting worm reduction gearboxes and geared motor units: nominal against actual ratio, load classification and service factor, mechanical against thermal rating, and the overh…
Engineering↗
Alloy Spring Steels
Chromium-vanadium (ASTM A231/A232, SAE 6150) and chromium-silicon (ASTM A401) spring wires — compositions, shock and temperature capability, supply conditions, and the prompt-he…
Engineering↗
Constant-Modulus Alloys
The special nickel and cobalt alloys whose elastic modulus barely changes with temperature — Iso-Elastic, Ni-Span C alloy 902, Elinvar, Elgiloy and Havar — plus the specialty ma…
Engineering↗
Copper-Base Spring Alloys
The three copper-base spring materials — spring brass, phosphor-bronze and beryllium-copper — with compositions, tensile strengths by temper and diameter, moduli, electrical con…
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Design Stresses and Fatigue
How to choose a safe working stress for a spring — fatigue theory, the three service classes and their cycle ranges, reading the recommended design-stress curves, the endurance …
Engineering↗
Flat High-Carbon Spring Steel Strip
Cold-rolled spring strip to ASTM A682 — the two steels that cover 95 % of flat springs, rolled tempers No. 5 to No. 1, mill-hardened T1–T3 strip with strength by thickness, edge…
Engineering↗
High-Carbon Spring Steels
The workhorse cold-coiled spring wires — music wire A228, hard-drawn A227 and A679, oil-tempered A229 and valve-quality A230 — with sizes, tensile ranges, moduli by diameter, el…
Engineering↗
Hot-Rolled Bars for Hot-Coiled Springs
Heavy springs are coiled red-hot from annealed bar. Carbon bars to ASTM A68/SAE 1095, the A331 alloy families 5160, 9260, 4150 and 8645–8660, tool steels for special cases, and …
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Metallurgy of Spring Steels
How spring steel is made — from ore, flux and coke through the blast furnace and basic-oxygen converter to killed ingots, billets, patented rod and cold-drawn wire — and what ea…
Engineering↗
Nickel-Base Spring Alloys
Monel 400 and K-500, Inconel 600 and X-750, and the minor nickel spring alloys — compositions, tensile strengths by diameter, the fall of modulus with temperature, service-tempe…
Engineering↗
Stainless Steel Wire and Strip
Spring stainless in three families — cold-worked austenitic 302/304/316, hardenable martensitic 414/420/431 and precipitation-hardening 17-7 PH — with properties, compositions, …
Engineering↗
Acme Screw Threads
The power-transmission thread: the trapezoidal Acme and Tr forms, the power-screw torque equations, a Tr30×6 jack worked in full — raising, lowering, efficiency and the self-loc…
Engineering↗
Adhesives and Sealants
Joining without holes: how adhesives hold and why surfaces decide, the shear-good-peel-bad design law with a lap joint worked to 4.69 kN, the chemistry shelf from epoxy to silic…
Engineering↗
Algebra and Equations
Rearranging formulas, essential identities, linear and simultaneous equations, quadratics and cubics, Newton–Raphson root finding, arithmetic and geometric progressions, binomia…
Engineering↗
Allowances and Tolerances for Fits
Limits and fits: why tolerances exist, the vocabulary of limits and deviations, clearance, transition and interference fits, the ISO grade system with the standard tolerance uni…
Engineering↗
Arbors, Chucks and Spindles
Holding the work and the tool: three-jaw, four-jaw and collet chucks and their runout, arbors for milling cutters, the spindle that drives them, and why gripping force falls wit…