Unpaid Spare Time

I realize that I wasn't a job shopper long enough, it wasn't even a year at Menasco and I really did not learn anything about being a contractor, well, maybe a bit, but mostly, my mindset was still very much that of a permie.

Permie, is that the right spelling?, perhaps it was, it was usually followed by wanker, for the full effect of the insult from the jobshoppeur, so my short tenure as a jobshopper was followed by a longer period of time as a PW.

Unpaid spare time continued, with a little bit of Patran education, but there was resistance, plus, I decided to learn some CAD and that was one thing that went down like a lead balloon, especially with the chief as he was not happy, not happy at all, with one of his minions learning to use a CAD terminal.

Yet, I persisted.

The reasoning behind that behaviour was that I believed there was a logical link between CAD and Patran and that conversion was possible between a three dimensional CAD database and a Patran model, it made perfect sense to "import" a solid model into Patran and then mesh it, plus it made sense to understand how the CAD models would dovetail into our analysis world.

But, the problem then was that (if my memory serves me well) the CAD software was written by one company, and that company wasn't PDA, so any importing would require a translation program, developed by PDA (eventually owned by MSC) and I think they were more keen to deliver the total package and sell the company the whole bundle. It seemed like everything was about money, and the software was insanely expensive, plus external forces wanted a change in analysis software, ie, NASTRAN and again, things would change once MSC took over.

I had the right idea, but they already had the solution, I just think they wanted Dowty to pay an enormous amount of money to achieve that goal. However, in the interim, while playing with the existing software, I learned quite a bit about the CAD process, something that would help me along the way.

It reminded me of the times back in 1985 when I would sit with Pete Gatehouse at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, we'd sit for hours at the "tube" and brainstorm various ideas for the T-45 landing gear and solve those kinematic problems in our own time, or the other times at APPH when Matt Hilliard and myself worked on the JAS-39 main fitting, rotating three dimensional points in space by creating a a BASIC program, almost as an unpaid hobby.

Unpaid spare time.