Leamington

April, 1984

The training started in Leamington Spa, it was at the other Automotive Products facility and I was learning Patran off someone who had learnt Patran. This was the usual method in the industry as companies would shell out the big bucks for one clever person to go on the real course, then allow that person to teach the rest of the world a subset of what they had learned.

Finite element model building back then was almost as interesting as knitting, and in fact was very similar, except that needles and wool were not used of course.

Create a point, create a node, create another, join them up. It was then a process to create a secondary line and then join the two lines up to make a surface or patch, then a second surface would be created and those two joined up to create a solid or hyperpatch, and so on until the arrangement of hyperpatches represented a component which loads could be applied to.

The first few days held a certain excitement, and then, very rapidly, boredom arrived in buckets. The boredom was tempered with frustration as models would crash and burn when submitted for analysis.

Real work started with the EH101 helicopter axle piston interface, a complex model (at the time) and the first benchmark. The time at Leamington would end when this model was created, loaded and ran reasonably.