February 28, 2025 • 48 mins
In this episode, Aaron Moncur sits down with Noah Burke, a certified SolidWorks professional and mechanical engineer, to explore the nuances of product design, engineering creativity, and the importance of asking the right questions. Noah shares insights from his journey at Pipeline and Colson Group, offering valuable advice for aspiring engineers.
Main Topics:
- Transitioning from hands-on assembly to product design
- The art of asking effective engineering questions
- Importance of SolidWorks certification
- Troubleshooting design challenges
- Emerging trends in 3D printing and product development
- Personal motivation and engineering passion
About the guest: Noah Burk is an experienced engineer with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a Minor in Manufacturing, along with a Certified SolidWorks Professional (CSWP) credential. He began his career at AccuBilt Automated Systems, where he contributed to drawing packages, design projects, and machine assembly. In 2022, he joined Pipeline Design & Engineering, developing advanced manufacturing processes, custom fixtures, and automated machines. Now, as a Product Design Engineer at Colson Group USA, Noah designs mobility solutions, ensuring performance, quality, and aesthetic standards. His career reflects a commitment to excellence, continuous learning, and adaptability.
Links:
Noah Burk - LinkedIn
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The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Noah Burk (00:00):
Don't test with too many variable changes at once.
You've changed one variable.
Test because you change fivevariables and you don't know
what fixed it.
Aaron Moncur (00:23):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast
today, we have the absolutepleasure of speaking with Noah
Burke, a certified SolidWorksprofessional and accomplished
mechanical engineer. Noah'sjourney has taken him from hands
on roles in design and assemblyto his current position as a
product design engineer atColson group USA. Notably, Noah
(00:46):
was also a valued member of ourteam here at pipeline where he
consistently demonstratedexceptional skill and
dedication. Noah so fun to beable to talk to you again. It's
been what, maybe a year or so,something like that, and it's
just really nice to see yourface and hear your voice. Well,
what made you decide to becomean engineer? Noah,
Noah Burk (01:10):
it's funny. Somebody asked me this about a week or
two ago, and it was really,really early on, when I was
pretty young, math and sciencewere always my, you know, they
came pretty easily to me.
Grammar and Spelling, that'swe're still working on that one
day.
Aaron Moncur (01:32):
I can attest to that one. Yeah, yeah,
Noah Burk (01:34):
it's, if you give me a formula, got it, but, yeah,
um, so they, you know, math andscience came pretty easy to me,
and I knew, you know, that washeavily involved in being an
engineer. A couple of my parentsfriends were engineers, and they
kind of really spoke highlyabout them. And everybody I
talked to spoke highly about,you know, knowing that engineer
(01:56):
so and so is an engineer, beingaround, you know, engineers, I
didn't really know what theydid. They seemed to kind of
stand a little taller, and theywere just respected individual,
and they did math and sciencestuff. So it's like, well, I can
do that stuff. So let me give acrack at being an engineer. So
(02:16):
really early on, I decided togive it a shot. I think my
sophomore year in high school iswhen I took my first CAD class.
And CAD came pretty quick, too.
And so I went out to Jacksonarea Career Center for two
years, and that rolled into myfirst job, doing CAD and and
(02:37):
getting to see, you know,automation and what you know,
engineering has actuallyapplied. There's a good amount
of people that go through schoolall the way through college
without getting that on the job.
Look at things. And I thinkthat's pretty crucial to see,
see it up front and know, okay,this I want to do.
Aaron Moncur (02:58):
Yeah, I can also attest to the fact that you are
very talented with CAD I mean,from the day that you were
hired, you hit the groundrunning, knew exactly what you
were doing, and only got evenbetter as as time went on. I
think Accu built was your firstjob, like, you know, real job,
working as an engineer. Is thataccurate? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so
(03:22):
you did a bunch of assemblythere. You did CAD as well, but
I think you did quite a lot ofhands on assembly work. How did
that like, hands on assemblywork and that experience
influence your your approach asa designer.
Noah Burk (03:38):
That's that's been a pretty big, pretty big influence
of really stepping through ofhow we're going to get this
together, because you can designa lot of things in CAD world
that you can't make and youcan't assemble. And in the
beginning, you know, you couldrun some of the interference
checks and, oh, it all checksout. That'll be good. And then
(03:59):
you you know, get into it. Youknow, when things are moving
specifically in automation, ifthere's a bullheaded way
carriage smacks into it, well,that's going to be a big
problem. So that's one of thebest ways to learn is to take
those designs and and walk theminto the real world and see the
(04:21):
mistake. Some, you know, couldbe major. Some could be little
things like, if a bolt head'shitting, we just have to counter
bore it right, and it'll betucked away. But, you know,
whole plates could be incorrect.
The Accu bill, we used a lot ofshims, which was nice, so there
was a little forgiveness, buthands on, and seeing how much
work goes into the things youdesign too, right? Because in
(04:44):
CAD you just float stuff inthere, and you put mates on it,
and you get faster and fasterdoing that, um, but you know
your your CAD level, as itincreases, you can go a lot
faster than anybody can put ittogether. So. What I've learned
thanks to the great people atpipelines, specifically Mike,
it's good to slow down. I wouldget so fast and I overlook
(05:06):
little things. So slowing downand taking a second and just
sitting there, it might not looklike you're doing anything, just
staring at the screen andzooming around at stuff, but
it's it's really crucial. Itsaves you a lot of time and
money to fix stuff in CAD versusfix stuff in real life.
Aaron Moncur (05:25):
Yeah, I think that's a big point. There's a
significant difference betweenaction and progress. And I think
a lot of us have a tendency tojust perform action right? We
just want to do, do, do becausewe know something we could do.
So we do it, as opposed tositting back and thinking about
(05:46):
All right, let's, let's try toproject, you know, three, four
steps into the future. Is whatI'm doing now going to
facilitate an efficient processmoving forward? Or are there
some things that I should bechanging right now so that I
make my future life a little biteasier. So, as you know very
well here at pipeline, we domanufacturing processes and
(06:10):
automated machines and customfixtures. Can you think of a
project, whether it was apipeline or somewhere, somewhere
else, but that was particularlychallenging for you and how you
overcame those challenges.
Noah Burk (06:24):
There's a lot of them, a lot of them to pick
from. That was one of the funthings, is the challenge. So,
you know, if, if everything wasthe same and everything was
easy, everyone would do it, andhaving that challenge. And some
of the projects that we wouldget a pipeline were especially
(06:47):
fun because people say, youknow, we've tried to do it and
we can't, we can't find a waythey would come to pipeline for
health. And so that just wasextra drive to, okay, how can we
figure this out? Um, it wasgreat brainstorming with people.
I really like doing that me andMark one of the one of the ones
that I'll touch on is the thepunch prototype. So it was
(07:10):
really small distal tip, and wehad to find a way to remove this
heat, heat, shrink wrap andpuncture it with a mechanical
device, because if you didanything with a laser, it
produced toxic fumes and mark.
And I you actually ended uphaving such a good brainstorming
(07:30):
session. We stayed a littleover. Just think about all these
crazy ways we could, you know,okay, they're going to load it
like this, and then what's goingto happen next, and it's all
going to be mechanical, and wegot to find a way to poke yoke
it, and we ended up on thislittle magic box. And, you know,
part of the reason why I'vegotten so much better at CAD,
(07:54):
especially working, you know,during my time at pipelines,
because there was great peoplearound me. Mark was one of them,
John's one of them. Aarondoesn't do a ton of CAD
nowadays, but I'm sure he's realgood too. And so I think it was
the next day or the day afterthat, Mark's like, Hey, check
this out. And he has got, like,a moving mechanism going on with
(08:17):
the planetary gear and cams andbearings. And I'm like, wow, it
was, you know, really early onat my my time at Pipeline, I was
okay. I didn't do a lot of thehard, hard work there, but the
figuring that stuff out, youknow, that brainstorm session.
(08:39):
And then eventually weincorporated a e stop mechanism
on it, so when they punched thedevice, it would stay locked and
you weren't able to unlock ituntil you turned this handle and
it cut the heat shrink. And thenonce it cut, it would pop up and
(08:59):
it would allow the operator tounload it. So, you know, working
with somebody else to mold thosetwo ideas together. When you
work with different people inCAD you find ways, you know,
1000 ways to skin a cat. There'sprobably a million ways in
SolidWorks. So find all theseunique ways that they would they
do something that you neverwould have thought of. And then
you think, Oh, that would bereally good for this scenario,
(09:21):
and that scenario so that thatone really stick it out to me,
because that was kind of the eyeopening, wow, like we're doing
some pretty crazy stuff
Aaron Moncur (09:31):
here. I remember them that one as well. It was
mechanically beautiful. I mean,it was a work of art. And a
black box is a good way todescribe it, because from the
outside, you couldn't really seeall the the intricate mechanisms
that were going on. But yeah, itwas a work of mechanism art, for
sure. Let's see transitioning tothe Colson group, which is where
(09:57):
you are now. What? Oh. What aresome of the things that you're
enjoying most there in yourcurrent role,
Noah Burk (10:05):
my current role, it's been so it's new product
development of products, right?
And at Pipeline. This is anothergreat thing about pipelines. It
could be automation, could beproduct development. There was a
mixed bag. So kind of jump backand forth, which is awesome. Now
it's mostly, pretty much allproduct development, so honing
(10:27):
in on products. So a lot oftimes we'll take, you know,
we're getting customer requestsfor a specific thing that you
know the market wants, and somepeople want one extreme, you
know, there's that bell curveright of possibilities that you
could design for. And so reallyhoning in on what product is
(10:49):
going to help the most amount ofcustomers they're going to
purchase. So finding a way to,you know, whether that's make
things adjustable or designingmultiple configurations right
from the get go, different topplates and things like that. So
it's much more product orientednow. But my type of pipeline,
(11:11):
you know, being able to ask thecustomers the questions, right?
Because a lot of times it's nota, you're not talking to a
technical, you know, engineer.
On the other side, you're justtalking to somebody, and they're
like, I want it like this. Andso you have to, okay, so how can
I ask them a question and beable to get a lot of information
(11:35):
from that answer, you know, morethan just the answer to that
simple question. It could be, ifI, if I ask this question, I can
get an answer to free questions.
So being able to talk with themand ask those, those questions.
And you know, if you're talkingto somebody who's not the best
with technical stuff, you know,simplifying it, and you can, you
(11:59):
know, gather information fromthat too. They might not be able
to say, you know, we need ourspring rate to be this and it
needs to be dampened this well,and it needs to be, you know,
have steel this thick, and itneeds to be this material type.
But you can ask questions tokind of get that information
(12:19):
from them. You know? Oh, is itgoing in the clean room? Oh, you
know, how much weight are youputting on this cart? Things
like that.
Aaron Moncur (12:29):
I think that's such an important skill to have,
is knowing how to ask goodquestions. I noticed this with
sales people a lot, and I knowwe're not. We're not this is not
a podcast about sales, but in away, we're all sales people.
We're all trying to sellsomething, our ideas, our
philosophies, whatever they are,engineers included. And the best
(12:53):
salespeople that I've workedwith don't just talk at me. They
ask me thoughtful questions, andthey listen to my responses, and
that's what guides theconversation. And I've worked
and I've found that that's rare.
Most people, most salespeople,and just people in general,
don't ask you many questions.
(13:17):
They tell you what they want totell you, right? Here's the
feature that this product has,and here's the warranty that it
has, and here's why it's sogreat. Well, okay, that's all
fine and well, but you don'teven know what I'm looking for,
because you haven't asked me anyquestions. So I love that, that
you're talking about questions,and it's just such an important
(13:39):
skill for for an engineer oranyone to have to be to get
really good at asking thoughtfulquestions? Yeah, I
Noah Burk (13:48):
totally agree. I read a book. I can't remember the
name. Read a book recently thattalked about, you know, like
kind of soft leading, right, notbarking orders or demanding
answers, but asking thosequestions to get the information
that you seek in a soft way,right? Because if you bark or
(14:10):
demand, people don't like that,right? Yeah, right. Like get
what you want, you might get itfast, but after they give you
the information and they turnaround, I did not enjoy my time
working with you, right? Yeah,and they go somewhere
Aaron Moncur (14:24):
else. Might burn the relationship
Noah Burk (14:27):
Exactly. Don't want to do that.
Aaron Moncur (14:30):
You have your your certified SolidWorks
professional certification. How?
How has that impacted your,career, or just your design
skills in general. Like, whathas that done for you? And do
you recommend it to otherengineers who are working in CAD
Noah Burk (14:51):
Yeah, I do recommend it. It's, you know, it is
something that can go on theresume. I have it on my resume,
and some people might not knowwhat it is. But it does show
that you, you know, had theskills to attain it right in
this seat, the professional one.
It was challenging. I studiedfor it for a while, and it gave
me a new look at taking thesePractice Exams and doing really
(15:14):
complicated part, geometry andthings like that. If you are
going to take it, I recommendwatching the RCM videos and
learning a bit about that,because that can be really
helpful. One of the things theydo in the the exam is they have
you design a part, and then theyhave you change certain things,
depending on how you designedit. Those changes can blow up
(15:35):
everything, or they can be aseamless transition, right? So
RCM really helped me out.
Aaron Moncur (15:42):
And RCM stands for resilient CAD modeling, and
that's a methodology that wedidn't actually develop, but
maybe refined the process alittle bit, and we have tutorial
about the RCM process andeverything start to finish on
the wave dot engineer that youcan access for free.
Noah Burk (16:02):
Yeah, that's that's a great resource. It's only gonna
improve, right? It's gonna giveyou a new way to look. One of
the 1000 or a million waste isgonna cap. But there's a lot of
other stuff because, like, thepm stuff that I got to be a part
of it at Pipeline macros. Mark,great with macros. I'm nowhere
(16:26):
near mark, but even being ableto learn from him some of the
small stuff, you know, I've beenable to build little macros to
take away, you know, littlethings that will drive you
crazy, right? If you're on acomputer for a long time and
you're doing repetitive taskslike, Man, I can can get at you,
but I highly recommend it. I'vebeen gearing up to start taking
(16:53):
the I believe it's three or fourthat you have to take before you
can do your CSW. So I've beengetting getting back in and
studying things like surfacingstuff. I've not used that
before, so things like weldmints and sheet metal, I've used
that quite a bit, but some ofthe other stuff, like surfacing,
(17:15):
I'll have to study it on prettygood Yeah,
Aaron Moncur (17:18):
I know when I see it on a resume. It always piques
my interest. You know, it's apositive if I see that on
someone's resume who's applyingfor a job here, I always think,
oh, that's, that's nice to see.
And you know, all else beingequal, I would take the person
who has that certification orthe one who doesn't, because it
does show a certain level of notjust skill or capability, but
(17:39):
but initiative as well. Yeah.
Can you think of a time whenyour work directly contributed
to improving either a product'sperformance or maybe even a
user's experience with thatproduct?
Noah Burk (17:58):
Yeah, we had a project was a pipeline. It was a
mechanism that kind of works,similar to a Kleenex box, and
the customer had brought it tous. They said it was a
prototype, but they had investeda lot of money into tooling, and
(18:18):
the product wasn't functioninghow they how they wanted it to
and so I got assigned theproduct or project, and I looked
at the product, and working withother engineers and interns, we
developed a test, carried, oh,you know, designed a fixture To
(18:39):
to do the test, carried out thetest, analyzed the data. We were
able to replace an off the shelfpart, opposed to altering any of
the injection molded parts thatwould allow this fancy Kleenex
box. It wasn't for clean accessfor some other stuff, to
(19:00):
actually dispense how it wasoriginally intended. So what was
probably a big worry for thecustomer of, oh man, I spent so
much money on tooling, and we'reour products, not where we need
it to be. How much more money amI going to have to invest in
changing that tooling before wecan actually start selling
(19:23):
these, because it's somethingwe're proud to sell. So just
switching out that little springMADE IT function how it was
originally intended. And I knowthe customer you know, had a big
sigh of relief of to thank youso much, something so little,
right? I don't even the springcost was so negligible, right?
(19:43):
When you're talking aboutchanging tooling.
Aaron Moncur (19:46):
Yeah, right, yeah, I remember this project as well.
All right. Well, let me take ashort break here and share that
the being an engineer podcast isbrought to you by pipeline
design and engineering, where wedon't design pipelines, but. We
do help companies developadvanced manufacturing
processes, automated machinesand custom fixtures,
complemented with product designand R and D services. You can
(20:11):
learn more at Team pipeline.usThe podcast is also sponsored by
the wave, an online platform offree tools, education and
community for engineers. Learnmore at the wave dot engineer,
and today we have the privilegeof speaking with Mr. Noah Burke.
Noah, can you share anexperience where you had to
(20:34):
troubleshoot a design issueduring the manufacturing phase?
So ideally, we work out all thekinks and bugs in the like
design prototyping kind of R Dstage. But you know, that's not
always the case. And every nowand then something slips
through, which is normal and andexpected to some degree. And so
tell us what was the problem,and how did you resolve it,
(20:58):
something that you had totroubleshoot during the
manufacturing phase. Yeah,again,
Noah Burk (21:05):
there's, there's more than one to choose from,
because, like you mentioned,always something that sneaks
through. One of the ones that Iremember, it was a desktop
fixture, and it was a remake ofan old an old design. And so in
(21:27):
this old design, they had only,there's knobs on this, on this
device that they would load intothe fixture. And originally they
were only driving one of theseknobs to test it out per cycle,
and they would change to a newknob. And this new fixture had
all five knobs driving at once.
And so there was a lot going on.
(21:49):
There was a motor per knob, youknow, we looked at doing it
mechanically, and it was cheaperto just go a motor per knob, and
then working with the controlsengineer to get all that
functioning correctly. Therewas, you know, changes we had to
make to the motors to get thecorrect motors in there.
(22:11):
Originally, I had specked outmotors that weren't the best for
the application, so I had tomake mechanical changes to the
brackets then make sure all thebelts are in there. Once that
was going on controls, there wassome problems with spinning, so
we had to dive into it and see,is this a mechanical thing
(22:32):
that's causing this issue, orcontrols thing? And so, you
know, if it gets, you know, whenyou get in there, you can kind
of get frustrated. You're like,oh, man, I was supposed to where
i i thought i'd crossed all myT's out of all my eyes, and
what's going on. And so it's,for me, it's important to take a
breath. Okay, can we let's run acycle, and let's just see and
(22:57):
think about it. And then, youknow, introduce some variable.
Brandon, who was around kind ofin my first half of when I was
at Pipeline, he shared somegreat knowledge with me. Don't
test with too many variablechanges at once. Test, change
(23:18):
one variable. Test because youchange five variables and you
don't know what fixed it. Sothat came in handy there, and we
were able to pinpoint theproblem and then fix it without
any, you know, major redesigns.
But that was one that sticks outto me.
Aaron Moncur (23:36):
Yeah, that's great advice. Don't change more than
one variable at a time whenyou're troubleshooting, I've run
into that myself, and Iremember, long time ago I read a
book about engineering ormanufacturing. I can't remember
exactly what the title of thebook was, but there was this
(23:58):
table in this book, and ittalked about the cost of fixing
a design flaw at different partsof the product development
cycle, life cycle, so I don'tremember. I'm going to mess this
up a little bit, but you'll getthe idea. So if you found design
(24:20):
flaw. Early in the design phase,it was like 1x you know, like,
just not, not a big deal if youfound a flaw. Late in the design
phase, it was like 10x if youfound a flaw after parts had
been manufactured and and youreceived them, it was like 100x
and then if you found a designflaw once parts had shipped to
(24:43):
the customer, then it was like1,000x right? So it was like
this increasing scale ofmagnitude every time or at each
subsequent phase of a productdevelopment and launch cycle.
And that always stuck with me.
I. Just how much more expensiveit gets the later in the design
phase or the development phasethat you identify these
(25:07):
problems. So it might feel likean overkill to spend so much
time during the design phase,the early phases of a
development project to bringpeople in cross functional teams
have all these eyes on it, but,man, it saves so much money if
you spend a little bit moreupfront and make sure it's right
(25:27):
before going into production andshipping product out to
customers.
Noah Burk (25:34):
Yeah, totally agree.
Aaron Moncur (25:37):
What are, what are some of the emerging or even
maturing trends in in productdesign that you think engineers
should be aware of, especiallyyounger engineers.
Noah Burk (25:51):
One of, yeah, one of the, kind of the most prominent,
and I think even a lot of peopleknow about it, right? It's 3d
printing. And I tell especiallythe younger kids that I help
teach a mentor, you got to payattention to 3d printing,
because there's a lot of moneybeing spent in development. You
(26:11):
know, I didn't get into it untilthree printers were pretty well
developed. But I you know, youcan look back on YouTube and see
some of the probably 1015, yearsago, the first 30 printers. And,
you know, they were more of atinker toy than a printing you
(26:31):
know, reliable printing devicewas changing and adjusting
settings and But thankfully,it's a lot of open source,
right, and they've been able todevelop that crazy fast where,
now you have printers, you sendit a file wirelessly. It's got a
video camera on it so you canmonitor it, and it's super fast.
So you get what you designed,and you just go pop it off the
(26:55):
bed, super easy, and you can putit together and test, you know,
whatever you design, whetherit's a mechanism or, you know,
just a trinket that you design.
So 3d printing is awesome, youknow, I love to play around with
your materials. Specifically inprinting, they have, like, metal
powders, and now they have metalprinters where they're like,
welding a bead around, you know,FDM metal printers and centering
(27:18):
metal printers. And so rightnow, those are super expensive,
but as the technology continuesto grow, it's only gonna get
cheaper. And now, you know, alot of companies have FDM
plastic dirty printers. It'spretty much the norm now, right?
But 1015, years ago, they wouldhave laughed at the idea of
(27:40):
putting in a tinker toy rightinto their called it like, you
know, way to get products outthe door faster. Um, so that's,
that's one of them that I'mdefinitely excited to see where
it goes. But there's a lot ofstuff that comes out pretty
frequently, you know, seeingtrade show videos and product
(28:01):
demonstrations is awesome.
LinkedIn is a great source.
Scroll through there and you seesome awesome stuff. I like to
just, you know, every oncewhile, when I hop on MasterCard,
I just scroll around and seewhat new things they've added. I
remember during my senior yearin college, I had found this
(28:23):
little detent, but instead oflike a plunger detent, it was a
directional detent. It kind oflooked like a little balloon,
and when you would push it oneway, all it would try and do is
return to center. And we wereconsidering using it for our
design, and I showed it to thesenior design director. He's
like, I've never seen thatbefore. That's pretty cool. And
(28:45):
how'd I find it? Just scrollingaround on McMaster car and
looking for, you know, whateverwas out there. And, you know,
McMaster cars, one automation,direct, Misumi. There's a lot of
you know suppliers that youknow, they're constantly looking
for good things to add to theircatalog. So as far as you know,
(29:05):
scrolling down a couple linessometimes you're, you know,
reading a newsletter here andthere to catch something new.
Aaron Moncur (29:15):
Great advice.
Great advice. One thing I alwaysappreciated about you during
your time here at Pipeline, wasthat you, you were, you always
had some other project going on,like a personal project, and it
often involved 3d printing. ButI just, I loved seeing that your
hobby was engineering as well,you know. And even within the
(29:39):
context of your actual job hereyou you never, were never
content to just do the minimum.
You always went that extra step.
Sometimes, like you mentioned,with you and Mark brainstorming,
it led to spending, you know, afew more hours past the typical
40 hour. Work Week, but youalways want that extra step.
(30:01):
Always went that extra mile, andyou were tenacious at finding
solutions. Where do you thinkthat that drive comes from? It?
It seems to me that it was neverto satisfy anyone else. It was
never to like, oh, the optics ofme working a few extra hours are
good. So I'm gonna work a fewextra hours. It seemed like it
was more of an internalmotivation. And I'm just
(30:24):
curious, if you've ever thoughtabout like, where does that
drive come
Noah Burk (30:31):
from? I think maybe I should spend some more time
thinking about it, but I think Ireally chose the right path for
me. You know, you hear storiesof friends that went to college
and they graduated college, andthey don't like what they do at
all. And I'm so far in theopposite direction, and I just
(30:53):
feel so bad for people, youknow, that struggle to find what
they really like to do. And Ireally, I really, like, you
know, do projects, right?
Whether they're personalprojects, it's personal project.
I want to make the best thingpossible for myself, right? A
lot of things like, I use this alot, you know, opposed to
(31:16):
buying, you know, a cabinet offof Amazon or Wayfair. I would
much rather spend double ortriple the amount of money and
buy the wood and make thecabinet myself, because you get
to add, you know, your personalflair to it and design it just
the way you want it. And then,you know, at work, you're doing
a customer's project, but it'sstill your brain child, right?
(31:41):
And you want it to be the bestthing, right? You want to hear
back from the customer and hear,I love to use this so much, and
I can't wait for the next timewe get to work with you and
pipeline, you know, at the time.
So that's what really drives me,is is, you know, building
(32:05):
something I love for myself andbuild something that people love
to use. Because, you know, ifyou just want to skate by and do
the bare minimum, that's fine,right? You, you know, all the
requirements are met. Customergets it. How's it work? Well, it
works fine. But, you know, we,you know, this is kind of floppy
(32:27):
over here. It's not like themost robust thing, and this is
kind of in the way, and wedidn't notice at the time, but
it does what it needs to do.
It's okay. And I don't want,it's okay. I want, wow, that's
pretty cool, and that's supernice and super slick. And, you
know, you can tell that somebodytook care and what they were
doing and thought about it alittle bit extra. And I think
(32:49):
it's easy for me to do that,because I like it so much that
it's like, you know, if you'redriving home, I'll be listening
to music or listen to a podcast.
And, oh, how could I make thatbetter? And it's not like a, you
know, nagging, because, youknow, your brain is like
(33:10):
reminding you, oh, you know,because of immense work
pressure, that you need to getthis done, and if you don't get
it done, you're going to be onthe frying pan, though it's a,
oh, well, you know, my brain'skind of not thinking about much,
and all of a sudden, what if Itried doing that? Could that be
better? And just playing aroundwith those ideas I find to be
(33:33):
great. So
Aaron Moncur (33:34):
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when
you said that you chose theright path for for you right?
And you just love doing thisstuff so it doesn't feel like
work. It's just, it'srecreation, it's play. It's
something to tickle your brain.
Love it. Any advice that youwould give to young engineers
who are interested in enteringthe field of product design and
(33:59):
development. Yeah,
Noah Burk (34:03):
learn CAD and use it to do all the things. So a lot
of like, like I mentioned aboutcompanies with you printers. A
whole lot of schools have 3dprinters now too. And you know,
I would be willing to wager itthat a lot of things that get
printed on those printers areprobably from thing averse. Your
printables just downloadedfiles, which are, you know,
(34:25):
they're fun, they're good. Butyou know to get onto a site like
onshape, where you can get afree trial, and YouTube and the
internet is at your fingertips,and you can find so much stuff,
so starting to build thosebuilding blocks early. You know,
(34:46):
as as early as high school.
Recently, I've been a personalrobotics mentor out at Jackson
area Career Center, and they useSolidWorks all the time, and
there's kids that are really,really good. Hit SolidWorks, and
it's, it's great to see. Youknow, they're, they're, when I,
when I started my first job, Ithought I was going to be the
(35:08):
young guy, but all these oldpeople wouldn't know what they
were doing. And I got put in myplace very quick. I was like, Oh
man, I thought extremely wrong.
And these people are, you know,two, 3x where I started at, so
they're starting to, you know,learn that stuff. But the
earlier you can learn it, thebetter, because you'll get
(35:33):
better at seeing, you know,places to use it. And doing the
personal projects has helped meout a ton doing crazy designs
just for fun, because it's fun,right? So the earlier you're
able to do that, the better. Andthen you'll be able to implement
(35:53):
your designs faster. You'll beable to think of crazier things
to design being you know,creative is another, another
part of it, and that one's alittle bit harder to kind of
teach, or, I'm sure there'sYouTube videos about it too.
But, you know, kind of mergingyour creativity with practical
(36:16):
things like CAD so you can bringyour creativity to life. You
know, the more refs you getdoing that, the better you're
going to be. So I, I have a lotof hope for this younger
generation, because they have alot of tools at their fingertips
now, and I probably had a goodamount of them that I, you know,
(36:37):
didn't get interested in untillate in high school. But now you
know, things are availableelementary school, even middle
school kids, and they're gettingto look at it, and hopefully
that sparks that interest evenearlier so they can get much
better than me. There's, there'sa lot of people out there that
I'm sure are much, much betterthan me, and there are a lot of
(36:59):
people who will be but theearlier you get the you know,
the higher
Aaron Moncur (37:03):
you can soar. Have you heard about this? It's a new
it's a startup called back flip.
I think it's backflip.ai. Youwould, you would, I think you
would get into this company. Youshould go check them out.
Backflip.ai, it's, it's aI CADmodeling. So you give it a text
prompt, and it creates a 3d CADmodel. And I think the output is
(37:26):
STL, I don't know. I don't knowwhat their, you know, their
trajectory is, if they just wantto help people, you know, put
things on Thingiverse orsomething, or if they intend for
this to become a seriousengineering tool, but just the,
I mean, we've all thought aboutit right with the rise of AI.
(37:46):
How is that going to change oraffect engineering? So anyway,
it's an interesting company thatpeople might people might want
to check out. I think they'repretty early right now and what
they have, but be superinteresting to see how how their
product matures over time. Yeah,
Noah Burk (38:04):
I'm definitely gonna check that out. I was looking
into, I heard like you could putlarge language or AI locally on
your computer. And I was like,Oh, what is that? I gotta learn
that. Because, you know, how canI get it to watch me and train
my own AI to do bad stuff,right? Like drawings. That'd be
great.
Aaron Moncur (38:27):
That would be great once AI can do drawings
for us, which it's probablygoing to happen. I'm sure there
are people out there working onthat right now. All right, Noah,
well, one more question, andthen we'll wrap things up. What
is one thing that you have doneto accelerate the speed of
engineering? Yeah,
Noah Burk (38:47):
so it's counter a little bit counter intuitive, to
accelerate, right? Is not alwaysworking faster and getting a
more developed first go at it.
Sometimes it's working a littlebit slower, taking that extra
thought and then also using yourcoworkers and the people around
(39:07):
you to bounce ideas off of fresheyes. Man, they are worth their
weight in gold. I constantlyI'll send Hey, you come take a
look at this. What do you thinkof this? Can I do this better?
They're like, Oh, I don't evenknow what this is, but why are
you doing it that way instead ofmaybe, like, this way, huh? I
didn't even think about that.
(39:31):
Then you get to chew on that fora little bit, and maybe that's
better, right? So fresh eyes anda little bit back and forth.
Now, that doesn't mean like, awhole 30 hour minute, sit down,
meeting right? It could just belike, oh, so and so is walking
by. I'm going to grab them realquick. Hey, check this out for
five minute. Little conversationthat can totally open you up,
(39:52):
because I've done it time andtime again, where I'm locked in
and I stared at CAD models for aweek or two weeks, and I.
Somebody just says, Well, lookat over there. Why is it that
way? I'm like, that's been therethe whole time, and I haven't
seen it. So that's a big one ofnot trying to go too fast, too
(40:14):
quick. Because in CAD, as I'msure a lot of people that use
CAD know, when you get really,really developed, and your
assemblies get a ton of parts inthem. You make one change to one
part, and there's waterfalleffects that could go, you know,
it could only be one part, ifyou're lucky, you know, two part
change. If you're lucky, itcould be three, four assemblies
need to change because the partsuse all over the place. And so
(40:37):
getting a really blocky thingdone at first. It's easily
adjustable, and then lockingthat down and taking those baby
steps is crucial, right? Youwant to be the fastest, right?
And you want to say, oh, man, Ican get this long project done
in a couple weeks, and I'm justgoing to show up to the 25%
(40:58):
Designer view with this totallydetailed and they're gonna be
Wow, and they'll do that alittle bit, and then they'll say
something like, well, why'd youdo it that way? Maybe we could
change that a little bit. Youknow? Yeah, we could change that
definitely. I totally understandwhy it's better. All of a
sudden, you're changing 15 partsand updating 15 drawings, and
you're pulling your hair outlike, Oh, why did I do this. So
(41:21):
learning that kind of, you know,cruising altitude that you're
comfortable with, and over time,as you as you cruise, you find
it you can start building upslowly. But I definitely made
the mistake of jumping too farand just doing this a lot of
times. So finding a good cruisepoint, and knowing your optimal
(41:45):
speed, and then slowly workingto build that up, because you'll
you'll catch yourself kind ofasking those same questions that
other people ask you, like,well, it's like this now, but
what if I flipped it? What if Iput it over here, or put it
upside down, you know, thelittle things like that. And so
you'll think about them ahead oftime. You say, Yep, this is why
(42:07):
I want it like this and not thatway. And so you, you know, grab
somebody that's walking by, andthey look at it and they ask
you, why'd you do why didn't youdo this way? XYZ? They're like,
yep, that makes sense. Sofinding a good cruising altitude
is gonna it can help you keepyour hair for longer, pulling it
(42:29):
out.
Aaron Moncur (42:29):
I think that's a really important lesson. And
I've, I've seen more times thanI care to count when exactly the
situation you discussed developswhere an engineer shows up to
what's supposed to be like,really high level concept design
review, and they've got all thedetails in there, right? They've
(42:51):
got all the edge radii andchamfers, and they've got
hardware everywhere. And you'relike, oh man. I mean, maybe at
one point I thought it was cool,because, oh, wow, it's all done
right, but, but I've seen thisenough times now to where, when
I see that, I'm like, oh, no, wejust spent way too much time
(43:12):
doing this level of of design.
Because inevitably, it's notgoing to be right, right? This
is, like, early stage conceptualstuff, and it's never right the
first time. That's nobody'sfault. It's just never right the
first time. And it's part of theprocess. So not going too far,
too soon. And then you mentionedgetting advice from other
people. Have other people lookat your design. That's that's
(43:34):
huge. We don't need to do thisby ourselves. We most of the
time, we shouldn't be doing thisourselves. It's not efficient to
try and do a complete designjust by yourself. You should
have someone else looking at itregularly, pointing things out.
Why is it like that? Whyshouldn't we do it like this? So
great answers, great answers.
(43:59):
Noah, what a delight has been tocatch up with you. It's so nice
to see your face and and hearyour voice. How can people get
in touch with you?
Noah Burk (44:08):
LinkedIn? No work on LinkedIn. That's probably the
best way. Don't have a ton ofsocial media, so LinkedIn is the
best way to get a hold of me.
Love to connect and startgrowing my network. That's
something that I should haverubbed off on me more, on my
time, on pipeline, you know,knowing a lot of people and
(44:29):
having a lot of followers onLinkedIn, you see that kind of
cool stuff that everybody'sdoing. That's another thing.
Hey, I've had in the sand,right? Just stay in your
industry and only seeing thingsin your industry. It's cool to
see things from otherindustries. There's examples of
pipeline where we've taken ideasfrom one industry and morphed
into a mechanism that'll workfor another one. So yeah,
(44:53):
connect with me on LinkedIn.
Love to see all the cool stuffyou guys are doing.
Aaron Moncur (44:59):
Yeah. Yeah, awesome. And we'll put a link to
your LinkedIn profile in theshow notes. Okay, well, to wrap
things up here, we're going tocontinue a trend and share a
review that one of you, dearlisteners sent to us. Highly
encouraged. I would love to getmore interaction with users,
(45:23):
with listeners. So if you have asuggestion for a guest or a
topic that you'd like to hear,please send it over. You can
find me on on LinkedIn as well.
Just send me a message there.
You can comment on one of thepodcast posts that we've done on
LinkedIn every week we postabout the most recent episode
(45:46):
that was released, and you canjust comment there, or you can
find me directly on LinkedIn andsend me a message. But this the
review that we're going to readtoday is from Lewis D and it
says, just have to mention thatI've listened to your podcast
for a while now, it convinced meto apply for an engineering
program and start that careerpath within my company. Thanks
(46:07):
for all of the time and effortyou put into it well. Thank you,
Louis. We appreciate the thecomment, the review, and
thrilled that it helped you makea choice that hopefully benefits
your life. And I think that's itfor today, so we'll wrap things
up here. Noah, thanks again forbeing on the show.
Noah Burk (46:28):
Thank you so much, Aaron, for having me.
Aaron Moncur (46:31):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please share
the episode to learn how yourteam can leverage our team's
expertise developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
(46:54):
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You.
Don't test with too many variable changes at once.
You've changed one variable.
Test because you change fivevariables and you don't know
what fixed it.
Aaron Moncur (00:23):
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast
today, we have the absolutepleasure of speaking with Noah
Burke, a certified SolidWorksprofessional and accomplished
mechanical engineer. Noah'sjourney has taken him from hands
on roles in design and assemblyto his current position as a
product design engineer atColson group USA. Notably, Noah
(00:46):
was also a valued member of ourteam here at pipeline where he
consistently demonstratedexceptional skill and
dedication. Noah so fun to beable to talk to you again. It's
been what, maybe a year or so,something like that, and it's
just really nice to see yourface and hear your voice. Well,
what made you decide to becomean engineer? Noah,
Noah Burk (01:10):
it's funny. Somebody asked me this about a week or
two ago, and it was really,really early on, when I was
pretty young, math and sciencewere always my, you know, they
came pretty easily to me.
Grammar and Spelling, that'swe're still working on that one
day.
Aaron Moncur (01:32):
I can attest to that one. Yeah, yeah,
Noah Burk (01:34):
it's, if you give me a formula, got it, but, yeah,
um, so they, you know, math andscience came pretty easy to me,
and I knew, you know, that washeavily involved in being an
engineer. A couple of my parentsfriends were engineers, and they
kind of really spoke highlyabout them. And everybody I
talked to spoke highly about,you know, knowing that engineer
(01:56):
so and so is an engineer, beingaround, you know, engineers, I
didn't really know what theydid. They seemed to kind of
stand a little taller, and theywere just respected individual,
and they did math and sciencestuff. So it's like, well, I can
do that stuff. So let me give acrack at being an engineer. So
(02:16):
really early on, I decided togive it a shot. I think my
sophomore year in high school iswhen I took my first CAD class.
And CAD came pretty quick, too.
And so I went out to Jacksonarea Career Center for two
years, and that rolled into myfirst job, doing CAD and and
(02:37):
getting to see, you know,automation and what you know,
engineering has actuallyapplied. There's a good amount
of people that go through schoolall the way through college
without getting that on the job.
Look at things. And I thinkthat's pretty crucial to see,
see it up front and know, okay,this I want to do.
Aaron Moncur (02:58):
Yeah, I can also attest to the fact that you are
very talented with CAD I mean,from the day that you were
hired, you hit the groundrunning, knew exactly what you
were doing, and only got evenbetter as as time went on. I
think Accu built was your firstjob, like, you know, real job,
working as an engineer. Is thataccurate? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so
(03:22):
you did a bunch of assemblythere. You did CAD as well, but
I think you did quite a lot ofhands on assembly work. How did
that like, hands on assemblywork and that experience
influence your your approach asa designer.
Noah Burk (03:38):
That's that's been a pretty big, pretty big influence
of really stepping through ofhow we're going to get this
together, because you can designa lot of things in CAD world
that you can't make and youcan't assemble. And in the
beginning, you know, you couldrun some of the interference
checks and, oh, it all checksout. That'll be good. And then
(03:59):
you you know, get into it. Youknow, when things are moving
specifically in automation, ifthere's a bullheaded way
carriage smacks into it, well,that's going to be a big
problem. So that's one of thebest ways to learn is to take
those designs and and walk theminto the real world and see the
(04:21):
mistake. Some, you know, couldbe major. Some could be little
things like, if a bolt head'shitting, we just have to counter
bore it right, and it'll betucked away. But, you know,
whole plates could be incorrect.
The Accu bill, we used a lot ofshims, which was nice, so there
was a little forgiveness, buthands on, and seeing how much
work goes into the things youdesign too, right? Because in
(04:44):
CAD you just float stuff inthere, and you put mates on it,
and you get faster and fasterdoing that, um, but you know
your your CAD level, as itincreases, you can go a lot
faster than anybody can put ittogether. So. What I've learned
thanks to the great people atpipelines, specifically Mike,
it's good to slow down. I wouldget so fast and I overlook
(05:06):
little things. So slowing downand taking a second and just
sitting there, it might not looklike you're doing anything, just
staring at the screen andzooming around at stuff, but
it's it's really crucial. Itsaves you a lot of time and
money to fix stuff in CAD versusfix stuff in real life.
Aaron Moncur (05:25):
Yeah, I think that's a big point. There's a
significant difference betweenaction and progress. And I think
a lot of us have a tendency tojust perform action right? We
just want to do, do, do becausewe know something we could do.
So we do it, as opposed tositting back and thinking about
(05:46):
All right, let's, let's try toproject, you know, three, four
steps into the future. Is whatI'm doing now going to
facilitate an efficient processmoving forward? Or are there
some things that I should bechanging right now so that I
make my future life a little biteasier. So, as you know very
well here at pipeline, we domanufacturing processes and
(06:10):
automated machines and customfixtures. Can you think of a
project, whether it was apipeline or somewhere, somewhere
else, but that was particularlychallenging for you and how you
overcame those challenges.
Noah Burk (06:24):
There's a lot of them, a lot of them to pick
from. That was one of the funthings, is the challenge. So,
you know, if, if everything wasthe same and everything was
easy, everyone would do it, andhaving that challenge. And some
of the projects that we wouldget a pipeline were especially
(06:47):
fun because people say, youknow, we've tried to do it and
we can't, we can't find a waythey would come to pipeline for
health. And so that just wasextra drive to, okay, how can we
figure this out? Um, it wasgreat brainstorming with people.
I really like doing that me andMark one of the one of the ones
that I'll touch on is the thepunch prototype. So it was
(07:10):
really small distal tip, and wehad to find a way to remove this
heat, heat, shrink wrap andpuncture it with a mechanical
device, because if you didanything with a laser, it
produced toxic fumes and mark.
And I you actually ended uphaving such a good brainstorming
(07:30):
session. We stayed a littleover. Just think about all these
crazy ways we could, you know,okay, they're going to load it
like this, and then what's goingto happen next, and it's all
going to be mechanical, and wegot to find a way to poke yoke
it, and we ended up on thislittle magic box. And, you know,
part of the reason why I'vegotten so much better at CAD,
(07:54):
especially working, you know,during my time at pipelines,
because there was great peoplearound me. Mark was one of them,
John's one of them. Aarondoesn't do a ton of CAD
nowadays, but I'm sure he's realgood too. And so I think it was
the next day or the day afterthat, Mark's like, Hey, check
this out. And he has got, like,a moving mechanism going on with
(08:17):
the planetary gear and cams andbearings. And I'm like, wow, it
was, you know, really early onat my my time at Pipeline, I was
okay. I didn't do a lot of thehard, hard work there, but the
figuring that stuff out, youknow, that brainstorm session.
(08:39):
And then eventually weincorporated a e stop mechanism
on it, so when they punched thedevice, it would stay locked and
you weren't able to unlock ituntil you turned this handle and
it cut the heat shrink. And thenonce it cut, it would pop up and
(08:59):
it would allow the operator tounload it. So, you know, working
with somebody else to mold thosetwo ideas together. When you
work with different people inCAD you find ways, you know,
1000 ways to skin a cat. There'sprobably a million ways in
SolidWorks. So find all theseunique ways that they would they
do something that you neverwould have thought of. And then
you think, Oh, that would bereally good for this scenario,
(09:21):
and that scenario so that thatone really stick it out to me,
because that was kind of the eyeopening, wow, like we're doing
some pretty crazy stuff
Aaron Moncur (09:31):
here. I remember them that one as well. It was
mechanically beautiful. I mean,it was a work of art. And a
black box is a good way todescribe it, because from the
outside, you couldn't really seeall the the intricate mechanisms
that were going on. But yeah, itwas a work of mechanism art, for
sure. Let's see transitioning tothe Colson group, which is where
(09:57):
you are now. What? Oh. What aresome of the things that you're
enjoying most there in yourcurrent role,
Noah Burk (10:05):
my current role, it's been so it's new product
development of products, right?
And at Pipeline. This is anothergreat thing about pipelines. It
could be automation, could beproduct development. There was a
mixed bag. So kind of jump backand forth, which is awesome. Now
it's mostly, pretty much allproduct development, so honing
(10:27):
in on products. So a lot oftimes we'll take, you know,
we're getting customer requestsfor a specific thing that you
know the market wants, and somepeople want one extreme, you
know, there's that bell curveright of possibilities that you
could design for. And so reallyhoning in on what product is
(10:49):
going to help the most amount ofcustomers they're going to
purchase. So finding a way to,you know, whether that's make
things adjustable or designingmultiple configurations right
from the get go, different topplates and things like that. So
it's much more product orientednow. But my type of pipeline,
(11:11):
you know, being able to ask thecustomers the questions, right?
Because a lot of times it's nota, you're not talking to a
technical, you know, engineer.
On the other side, you're justtalking to somebody, and they're
like, I want it like this. Andso you have to, okay, so how can
I ask them a question and beable to get a lot of information
(11:35):
from that answer, you know, morethan just the answer to that
simple question. It could be, ifI, if I ask this question, I can
get an answer to free questions.
So being able to talk with themand ask those, those questions.
And you know, if you're talkingto somebody who's not the best
with technical stuff, you know,simplifying it, and you can, you
(11:59):
know, gather information fromthat too. They might not be able
to say, you know, we need ourspring rate to be this and it
needs to be dampened this well,and it needs to be, you know,
have steel this thick, and itneeds to be this material type.
But you can ask questions tokind of get that information
(12:19):
from them. You know? Oh, is itgoing in the clean room? Oh, you
know, how much weight are youputting on this cart? Things
like that.
Aaron Moncur (12:29):
I think that's such an important skill to have,
is knowing how to ask goodquestions. I noticed this with
sales people a lot, and I knowwe're not. We're not this is not
a podcast about sales, but in away, we're all sales people.
We're all trying to sellsomething, our ideas, our
philosophies, whatever they are,engineers included. And the best
(12:53):
salespeople that I've workedwith don't just talk at me. They
ask me thoughtful questions, andthey listen to my responses, and
that's what guides theconversation. And I've worked
and I've found that that's rare.
Most people, most salespeople,and just people in general,
don't ask you many questions.
(13:17):
They tell you what they want totell you, right? Here's the
feature that this product has,and here's the warranty that it
has, and here's why it's sogreat. Well, okay, that's all
fine and well, but you don'teven know what I'm looking for,
because you haven't asked me anyquestions. So I love that, that
you're talking about questions,and it's just such an important
(13:39):
skill for for an engineer oranyone to have to be to get
really good at asking thoughtfulquestions? Yeah, I
Noah Burk (13:48):
totally agree. I read a book. I can't remember the
name. Read a book recently thattalked about, you know, like
kind of soft leading, right, notbarking orders or demanding
answers, but asking thosequestions to get the information
that you seek in a soft way,right? Because if you bark or
(14:10):
demand, people don't like that,right? Yeah, right. Like get
what you want, you might get itfast, but after they give you
the information and they turnaround, I did not enjoy my time
working with you, right? Yeah,and they go somewhere
Aaron Moncur (14:24):
else. Might burn the relationship
Noah Burk (14:27):
Exactly. Don't want to do that.
Aaron Moncur (14:30):
You have your your certified SolidWorks
professional certification. How?
How has that impacted your,career, or just your design
skills in general. Like, whathas that done for you? And do
you recommend it to otherengineers who are working in CAD
Noah Burk (14:51):
Yeah, I do recommend it. It's, you know, it is
something that can go on theresume. I have it on my resume,
and some people might not knowwhat it is. But it does show
that you, you know, had theskills to attain it right in
this seat, the professional one.
It was challenging. I studiedfor it for a while, and it gave
me a new look at taking thesePractice Exams and doing really
(15:14):
complicated part, geometry andthings like that. If you are
going to take it, I recommendwatching the RCM videos and
learning a bit about that,because that can be really
helpful. One of the things theydo in the the exam is they have
you design a part, and then theyhave you change certain things,
depending on how you designedit. Those changes can blow up
(15:35):
everything, or they can be aseamless transition, right? So
RCM really helped me out.
Aaron Moncur (15:42):
And RCM stands for resilient CAD modeling, and
that's a methodology that wedidn't actually develop, but
maybe refined the process alittle bit, and we have tutorial
about the RCM process andeverything start to finish on
the wave dot engineer that youcan access for free.
Noah Burk (16:02):
Yeah, that's that's a great resource. It's only gonna
improve, right? It's gonna giveyou a new way to look. One of
the 1000 or a million waste isgonna cap. But there's a lot of
other stuff because, like, thepm stuff that I got to be a part
of it at Pipeline macros. Mark,great with macros. I'm nowhere
(16:26):
near mark, but even being ableto learn from him some of the
small stuff, you know, I've beenable to build little macros to
take away, you know, littlethings that will drive you
crazy, right? If you're on acomputer for a long time and
you're doing repetitive taskslike, Man, I can can get at you,
but I highly recommend it. I'vebeen gearing up to start taking
(16:53):
the I believe it's three or fourthat you have to take before you
can do your CSW. So I've beengetting getting back in and
studying things like surfacingstuff. I've not used that
before, so things like weldmints and sheet metal, I've used
that quite a bit, but some ofthe other stuff, like surfacing,
(17:15):
I'll have to study it on prettygood Yeah,
Aaron Moncur (17:18):
I know when I see it on a resume. It always piques
my interest. You know, it's apositive if I see that on
someone's resume who's applyingfor a job here, I always think,
oh, that's, that's nice to see.
And you know, all else beingequal, I would take the person
who has that certification orthe one who doesn't, because it
does show a certain level of notjust skill or capability, but
(17:39):
but initiative as well. Yeah.
Can you think of a time whenyour work directly contributed
to improving either a product'sperformance or maybe even a
user's experience with thatproduct?
Noah Burk (17:58):
Yeah, we had a project was a pipeline. It was a
mechanism that kind of works,similar to a Kleenex box, and
the customer had brought it tous. They said it was a
prototype, but they had investeda lot of money into tooling, and
(18:18):
the product wasn't functioninghow they how they wanted it to
and so I got assigned theproduct or project, and I looked
at the product, and working withother engineers and interns, we
developed a test, carried, oh,you know, designed a fixture To
(18:39):
to do the test, carried out thetest, analyzed the data. We were
able to replace an off the shelfpart, opposed to altering any of
the injection molded parts thatwould allow this fancy Kleenex
box. It wasn't for clean accessfor some other stuff, to
(19:00):
actually dispense how it wasoriginally intended. So what was
probably a big worry for thecustomer of, oh man, I spent so
much money on tooling, and we'reour products, not where we need
it to be. How much more money amI going to have to invest in
changing that tooling before wecan actually start selling
(19:23):
these, because it's somethingwe're proud to sell. So just
switching out that little springMADE IT function how it was
originally intended. And I knowthe customer you know, had a big
sigh of relief of to thank youso much, something so little,
right? I don't even the springcost was so negligible, right?
(19:43):
When you're talking aboutchanging tooling.
Aaron Moncur (19:46):
Yeah, right, yeah, I remember this project as well.
All right. Well, let me take ashort break here and share that
the being an engineer podcast isbrought to you by pipeline
design and engineering, where wedon't design pipelines, but. We
do help companies developadvanced manufacturing
processes, automated machinesand custom fixtures,
complemented with product designand R and D services. You can
(20:11):
learn more at Team pipeline.usThe podcast is also sponsored by
the wave, an online platform offree tools, education and
community for engineers. Learnmore at the wave dot engineer,
and today we have the privilegeof speaking with Mr. Noah Burke.
Noah, can you share anexperience where you had to
(20:34):
troubleshoot a design issueduring the manufacturing phase?
So ideally, we work out all thekinks and bugs in the like
design prototyping kind of R Dstage. But you know, that's not
always the case. And every nowand then something slips
through, which is normal and andexpected to some degree. And so
tell us what was the problem,and how did you resolve it,
(20:58):
something that you had totroubleshoot during the
manufacturing phase. Yeah,again,
Noah Burk (21:05):
there's, there's more than one to choose from,
because, like you mentioned,always something that sneaks
through. One of the ones that Iremember, it was a desktop
fixture, and it was a remake ofan old an old design. And so in
(21:27):
this old design, they had only,there's knobs on this, on this
device that they would load intothe fixture. And originally they
were only driving one of theseknobs to test it out per cycle,
and they would change to a newknob. And this new fixture had
all five knobs driving at once.
And so there was a lot going on.
(21:49):
There was a motor per knob, youknow, we looked at doing it
mechanically, and it was cheaperto just go a motor per knob, and
then working with the controlsengineer to get all that
functioning correctly. Therewas, you know, changes we had to
make to the motors to get thecorrect motors in there.
(22:11):
Originally, I had specked outmotors that weren't the best for
the application, so I had tomake mechanical changes to the
brackets then make sure all thebelts are in there. Once that
was going on controls, there wassome problems with spinning, so
we had to dive into it and see,is this a mechanical thing
(22:32):
that's causing this issue, orcontrols thing? And so, you
know, if it gets, you know, whenyou get in there, you can kind
of get frustrated. You're like,oh, man, I was supposed to where
i i thought i'd crossed all myT's out of all my eyes, and
what's going on. And so it's,for me, it's important to take a
breath. Okay, can we let's run acycle, and let's just see and
(22:57):
think about it. And then, youknow, introduce some variable.
Brandon, who was around kind ofin my first half of when I was
at Pipeline, he shared somegreat knowledge with me. Don't
test with too many variablechanges at once. Test, change
(23:18):
one variable. Test because youchange five variables and you
don't know what fixed it. Sothat came in handy there, and we
were able to pinpoint theproblem and then fix it without
any, you know, major redesigns.
But that was one that sticks outto me.
Aaron Moncur (23:36):
Yeah, that's great advice. Don't change more than
one variable at a time whenyou're troubleshooting, I've run
into that myself, and Iremember, long time ago I read a
book about engineering ormanufacturing. I can't remember
exactly what the title of thebook was, but there was this
(23:58):
table in this book, and ittalked about the cost of fixing
a design flaw at different partsof the product development
cycle, life cycle, so I don'tremember. I'm going to mess this
up a little bit, but you'll getthe idea. So if you found design
(24:20):
flaw. Early in the design phase,it was like 1x you know, like,
just not, not a big deal if youfound a flaw. Late in the design
phase, it was like 10x if youfound a flaw after parts had
been manufactured and and youreceived them, it was like 100x
and then if you found a designflaw once parts had shipped to
(24:43):
the customer, then it was like1,000x right? So it was like
this increasing scale ofmagnitude every time or at each
subsequent phase of a productdevelopment and launch cycle.
And that always stuck with me.
I. Just how much more expensiveit gets the later in the design
phase or the development phasethat you identify these
(25:07):
problems. So it might feel likean overkill to spend so much
time during the design phase,the early phases of a
development project to bringpeople in cross functional teams
have all these eyes on it, but,man, it saves so much money if
you spend a little bit moreupfront and make sure it's right
(25:27):
before going into production andshipping product out to
customers.
Noah Burk (25:34):
Yeah, totally agree.
Aaron Moncur (25:37):
What are, what are some of the emerging or even
maturing trends in in productdesign that you think engineers
should be aware of, especiallyyounger engineers.
Noah Burk (25:51):
One of, yeah, one of the, kind of the most prominent,
and I think even a lot of peopleknow about it, right? It's 3d
printing. And I tell especiallythe younger kids that I help
teach a mentor, you got to payattention to 3d printing,
because there's a lot of moneybeing spent in development. You
(26:11):
know, I didn't get into it untilthree printers were pretty well
developed. But I you know, youcan look back on YouTube and see
some of the probably 1015, yearsago, the first 30 printers. And,
you know, they were more of atinker toy than a printing you
(26:31):
know, reliable printing devicewas changing and adjusting
settings and But thankfully,it's a lot of open source,
right, and they've been able todevelop that crazy fast where,
now you have printers, you sendit a file wirelessly. It's got a
video camera on it so you canmonitor it, and it's super fast.
So you get what you designed,and you just go pop it off the
(26:55):
bed, super easy, and you can putit together and test, you know,
whatever you design, whetherit's a mechanism or, you know,
just a trinket that you design.
So 3d printing is awesome, youknow, I love to play around with
your materials. Specifically inprinting, they have, like, metal
powders, and now they have metalprinters where they're like,
welding a bead around, you know,FDM metal printers and centering
(27:18):
metal printers. And so rightnow, those are super expensive,
but as the technology continuesto grow, it's only gonna get
cheaper. And now, you know, alot of companies have FDM
plastic dirty printers. It'spretty much the norm now, right?
But 1015, years ago, they wouldhave laughed at the idea of
(27:40):
putting in a tinker toy rightinto their called it like, you
know, way to get products outthe door faster. Um, so that's,
that's one of them that I'mdefinitely excited to see where
it goes. But there's a lot ofstuff that comes out pretty
frequently, you know, seeingtrade show videos and product
(28:01):
demonstrations is awesome.
LinkedIn is a great source.
Scroll through there and you seesome awesome stuff. I like to
just, you know, every oncewhile, when I hop on MasterCard,
I just scroll around and seewhat new things they've added. I
remember during my senior yearin college, I had found this
(28:23):
little detent, but instead oflike a plunger detent, it was a
directional detent. It kind oflooked like a little balloon,
and when you would push it oneway, all it would try and do is
return to center. And we wereconsidering using it for our
design, and I showed it to thesenior design director. He's
like, I've never seen thatbefore. That's pretty cool. And
(28:45):
how'd I find it? Just scrollingaround on McMaster car and
looking for, you know, whateverwas out there. And, you know,
McMaster cars, one automation,direct, Misumi. There's a lot of
you know suppliers that youknow, they're constantly looking
for good things to add to theircatalog. So as far as you know,
(29:05):
scrolling down a couple linessometimes you're, you know,
reading a newsletter here andthere to catch something new.
Aaron Moncur (29:15):
Great advice.
Great advice. One thing I alwaysappreciated about you during
your time here at Pipeline, wasthat you, you were, you always
had some other project going on,like a personal project, and it
often involved 3d printing. ButI just, I loved seeing that your
hobby was engineering as well,you know. And even within the
(29:39):
context of your actual job hereyou you never, were never
content to just do the minimum.
You always went that extra step.
Sometimes, like you mentioned,with you and Mark brainstorming,
it led to spending, you know, afew more hours past the typical
40 hour. Work Week, but youalways want that extra step.
(30:01):
Always went that extra mile, andyou were tenacious at finding
solutions. Where do you thinkthat that drive comes from? It?
It seems to me that it was neverto satisfy anyone else. It was
never to like, oh, the optics ofme working a few extra hours are
good. So I'm gonna work a fewextra hours. It seemed like it
was more of an internalmotivation. And I'm just
(30:24):
curious, if you've ever thoughtabout like, where does that
drive come
Noah Burk (30:31):
from? I think maybe I should spend some more time
thinking about it, but I think Ireally chose the right path for
me. You know, you hear storiesof friends that went to college
and they graduated college, andthey don't like what they do at
all. And I'm so far in theopposite direction, and I just
(30:53):
feel so bad for people, youknow, that struggle to find what
they really like to do. And Ireally, I really, like, you
know, do projects, right?
Whether they're personalprojects, it's personal project.
I want to make the best thingpossible for myself, right? A
lot of things like, I use this alot, you know, opposed to
(31:16):
buying, you know, a cabinet offof Amazon or Wayfair. I would
much rather spend double ortriple the amount of money and
buy the wood and make thecabinet myself, because you get
to add, you know, your personalflair to it and design it just
the way you want it. And then,you know, at work, you're doing
a customer's project, but it'sstill your brain child, right?
(31:41):
And you want it to be the bestthing, right? You want to hear
back from the customer and hear,I love to use this so much, and
I can't wait for the next timewe get to work with you and
pipeline, you know, at the time.
So that's what really drives me,is is, you know, building
(32:05):
something I love for myself andbuild something that people love
to use. Because, you know, ifyou just want to skate by and do
the bare minimum, that's fine,right? You, you know, all the
requirements are met. Customergets it. How's it work? Well, it
works fine. But, you know, we,you know, this is kind of floppy
(32:27):
over here. It's not like themost robust thing, and this is
kind of in the way, and wedidn't notice at the time, but
it does what it needs to do.
It's okay. And I don't want,it's okay. I want, wow, that's
pretty cool, and that's supernice and super slick. And, you
know, you can tell that somebodytook care and what they were
doing and thought about it alittle bit extra. And I think
(32:49):
it's easy for me to do that,because I like it so much that
it's like, you know, if you'redriving home, I'll be listening
to music or listen to a podcast.
And, oh, how could I make thatbetter? And it's not like a, you
know, nagging, because, youknow, your brain is like
(33:10):
reminding you, oh, you know,because of immense work
pressure, that you need to getthis done, and if you don't get
it done, you're going to be onthe frying pan, though it's a,
oh, well, you know, my brain'skind of not thinking about much,
and all of a sudden, what if Itried doing that? Could that be
better? And just playing aroundwith those ideas I find to be
(33:33):
great. So
Aaron Moncur (33:34):
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when
you said that you chose theright path for for you right?
And you just love doing thisstuff so it doesn't feel like
work. It's just, it'srecreation, it's play. It's
something to tickle your brain.
Love it. Any advice that youwould give to young engineers
who are interested in enteringthe field of product design and
(33:59):
development. Yeah,
Noah Burk (34:03):
learn CAD and use it to do all the things. So a lot
of like, like I mentioned aboutcompanies with you printers. A
whole lot of schools have 3dprinters now too. And you know,
I would be willing to wager itthat a lot of things that get
printed on those printers areprobably from thing averse. Your
printables just downloadedfiles, which are, you know,
(34:25):
they're fun, they're good. Butyou know to get onto a site like
onshape, where you can get afree trial, and YouTube and the
internet is at your fingertips,and you can find so much stuff,
so starting to build thosebuilding blocks early. You know,
(34:46):
as as early as high school.
Recently, I've been a personalrobotics mentor out at Jackson
area Career Center, and they useSolidWorks all the time, and
there's kids that are really,really good. Hit SolidWorks, and
it's, it's great to see. Youknow, they're, they're, when I,
when I started my first job, Ithought I was going to be the
(35:08):
young guy, but all these oldpeople wouldn't know what they
were doing. And I got put in myplace very quick. I was like, Oh
man, I thought extremely wrong.
And these people are, you know,two, 3x where I started at, so
they're starting to, you know,learn that stuff. But the
earlier you can learn it, thebetter, because you'll get
(35:33):
better at seeing, you know,places to use it. And doing the
personal projects has helped meout a ton doing crazy designs
just for fun, because it's fun,right? So the earlier you're
able to do that, the better. Andthen you'll be able to implement
(35:53):
your designs faster. You'll beable to think of crazier things
to design being you know,creative is another, another
part of it, and that one's alittle bit harder to kind of
teach, or, I'm sure there'sYouTube videos about it too.
But, you know, kind of mergingyour creativity with practical
(36:16):
things like CAD so you can bringyour creativity to life. You
know, the more refs you getdoing that, the better you're
going to be. So I, I have a lotof hope for this younger
generation, because they have alot of tools at their fingertips
now, and I probably had a goodamount of them that I, you know,
(36:37):
didn't get interested in untillate in high school. But now you
know, things are availableelementary school, even middle
school kids, and they're gettingto look at it, and hopefully
that sparks that interest evenearlier so they can get much
better than me. There's, there'sa lot of people out there that
I'm sure are much, much betterthan me, and there are a lot of
(36:59):
people who will be but theearlier you get the you know,
the higher
Aaron Moncur (37:03):
you can soar. Have you heard about this? It's a new
it's a startup called back flip.
I think it's backflip.ai. Youwould, you would, I think you
would get into this company. Youshould go check them out.
Backflip.ai, it's, it's aI CADmodeling. So you give it a text
prompt, and it creates a 3d CADmodel. And I think the output is
(37:26):
STL, I don't know. I don't knowwhat their, you know, their
trajectory is, if they just wantto help people, you know, put
things on Thingiverse orsomething, or if they intend for
this to become a seriousengineering tool, but just the,
I mean, we've all thought aboutit right with the rise of AI.
(37:46):
How is that going to change oraffect engineering? So anyway,
it's an interesting company thatpeople might people might want
to check out. I think they'repretty early right now and what
they have, but be superinteresting to see how how their
product matures over time. Yeah,
Noah Burk (38:04):
I'm definitely gonna check that out. I was looking
into, I heard like you could putlarge language or AI locally on
your computer. And I was like,Oh, what is that? I gotta learn
that. Because, you know, how canI get it to watch me and train
my own AI to do bad stuff,right? Like drawings. That'd be
great.
Aaron Moncur (38:27):
That would be great once AI can do drawings
for us, which it's probablygoing to happen. I'm sure there
are people out there working onthat right now. All right, Noah,
well, one more question, andthen we'll wrap things up. What
is one thing that you have doneto accelerate the speed of
engineering? Yeah,
Noah Burk (38:47):
so it's counter a little bit counter intuitive, to
accelerate, right? Is not alwaysworking faster and getting a
more developed first go at it.
Sometimes it's working a littlebit slower, taking that extra
thought and then also using yourcoworkers and the people around
(39:07):
you to bounce ideas off of fresheyes. Man, they are worth their
weight in gold. I constantlyI'll send Hey, you come take a
look at this. What do you thinkof this? Can I do this better?
They're like, Oh, I don't evenknow what this is, but why are
you doing it that way instead ofmaybe, like, this way, huh? I
didn't even think about that.
(39:31):
Then you get to chew on that fora little bit, and maybe that's
better, right? So fresh eyes anda little bit back and forth.
Now, that doesn't mean like, awhole 30 hour minute, sit down,
meeting right? It could just belike, oh, so and so is walking
by. I'm going to grab them realquick. Hey, check this out for
five minute. Little conversationthat can totally open you up,
(39:52):
because I've done it time andtime again, where I'm locked in
and I stared at CAD models for aweek or two weeks, and I.
Somebody just says, Well, lookat over there. Why is it that
way? I'm like, that's been therethe whole time, and I haven't
seen it. So that's a big one ofnot trying to go too fast, too
(40:14):
quick. Because in CAD, as I'msure a lot of people that use
CAD know, when you get really,really developed, and your
assemblies get a ton of parts inthem. You make one change to one
part, and there's waterfalleffects that could go, you know,
it could only be one part, ifyou're lucky, you know, two part
change. If you're lucky, itcould be three, four assemblies
need to change because the partsuse all over the place. And so
(40:37):
getting a really blocky thingdone at first. It's easily
adjustable, and then lockingthat down and taking those baby
steps is crucial, right? Youwant to be the fastest, right?
And you want to say, oh, man, Ican get this long project done
in a couple weeks, and I'm justgoing to show up to the 25%
(40:58):
Designer view with this totallydetailed and they're gonna be
Wow, and they'll do that alittle bit, and then they'll say
something like, well, why'd youdo it that way? Maybe we could
change that a little bit. Youknow? Yeah, we could change that
definitely. I totally understandwhy it's better. All of a
sudden, you're changing 15 partsand updating 15 drawings, and
you're pulling your hair outlike, Oh, why did I do this. So
(41:21):
learning that kind of, you know,cruising altitude that you're
comfortable with, and over time,as you as you cruise, you find
it you can start building upslowly. But I definitely made
the mistake of jumping too farand just doing this a lot of
times. So finding a good cruisepoint, and knowing your optimal
(41:45):
speed, and then slowly workingto build that up, because you'll
you'll catch yourself kind ofasking those same questions that
other people ask you, like,well, it's like this now, but
what if I flipped it? What if Iput it over here, or put it
upside down, you know, thelittle things like that. And so
you'll think about them ahead oftime. You say, Yep, this is why
(42:07):
I want it like this and not thatway. And so you, you know, grab
somebody that's walking by, andthey look at it and they ask
you, why'd you do why didn't youdo this way? XYZ? They're like,
yep, that makes sense. Sofinding a good cruising altitude
is gonna it can help you keepyour hair for longer, pulling it
(42:29):
out.
Aaron Moncur (42:29):
I think that's a really important lesson. And
I've, I've seen more times thanI care to count when exactly the
situation you discussed developswhere an engineer shows up to
what's supposed to be like,really high level concept design
review, and they've got all thedetails in there, right? They've
(42:51):
got all the edge radii andchamfers, and they've got
hardware everywhere. And you'relike, oh man. I mean, maybe at
one point I thought it was cool,because, oh, wow, it's all done
right, but, but I've seen thisenough times now to where, when
I see that, I'm like, oh, no, wejust spent way too much time
(43:12):
doing this level of of design.
Because inevitably, it's notgoing to be right, right? This
is, like, early stage conceptualstuff, and it's never right the
first time. That's nobody'sfault. It's just never right the
first time. And it's part of theprocess. So not going too far,
too soon. And then you mentionedgetting advice from other
people. Have other people lookat your design. That's that's
(43:34):
huge. We don't need to do thisby ourselves. We most of the
time, we shouldn't be doing thisourselves. It's not efficient to
try and do a complete designjust by yourself. You should
have someone else looking at itregularly, pointing things out.
Why is it like that? Whyshouldn't we do it like this? So
great answers, great answers.
(43:59):
Noah, what a delight has been tocatch up with you. It's so nice
to see your face and and hearyour voice. How can people get
in touch with you?
Noah Burk (44:08):
LinkedIn? No work on LinkedIn. That's probably the
best way. Don't have a ton ofsocial media, so LinkedIn is the
best way to get a hold of me.
Love to connect and startgrowing my network. That's
something that I should haverubbed off on me more, on my
time, on pipeline, you know,knowing a lot of people and
(44:29):
having a lot of followers onLinkedIn, you see that kind of
cool stuff that everybody'sdoing. That's another thing.
Hey, I've had in the sand,right? Just stay in your
industry and only seeing thingsin your industry. It's cool to
see things from otherindustries. There's examples of
pipeline where we've taken ideasfrom one industry and morphed
into a mechanism that'll workfor another one. So yeah,
(44:53):
connect with me on LinkedIn.
Love to see all the cool stuffyou guys are doing.
Aaron Moncur (44:59):
Yeah. Yeah, awesome. And we'll put a link to
your LinkedIn profile in theshow notes. Okay, well, to wrap
things up here, we're going tocontinue a trend and share a
review that one of you, dearlisteners sent to us. Highly
encouraged. I would love to getmore interaction with users,
(45:23):
with listeners. So if you have asuggestion for a guest or a
topic that you'd like to hear,please send it over. You can
find me on on LinkedIn as well.
Just send me a message there.
You can comment on one of thepodcast posts that we've done on
LinkedIn every week we postabout the most recent episode
(45:46):
that was released, and you canjust comment there, or you can
find me directly on LinkedIn andsend me a message. But this the
review that we're going to readtoday is from Lewis D and it
says, just have to mention thatI've listened to your podcast
for a while now, it convinced meto apply for an engineering
program and start that careerpath within my company. Thanks
(46:07):
for all of the time and effortyou put into it well. Thank you,
Louis. We appreciate the thecomment, the review, and
thrilled that it helped you makea choice that hopefully benefits
your life. And I think that's itfor today, so we'll wrap things
up here. Noah, thanks again forbeing on the show.
Noah Burk (46:28):
Thank you so much, Aaron, for having me.
Aaron Moncur (46:31):
I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and
engineering. If you liked whatyou heard today, please share
the episode to learn how yourteam can leverage our team's
expertise developing advancedmanufacturing processes,
automated machines and customfixtures, complemented with
product design and R D services.
Visit us at Team pipeline.us. Tojoin a vibrant community of
(46:54):
engineers online. Visit thewave. Dot, engineer, thank you
for listening. You.
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