The Mote Method

Engineering Phrases

January 11, 2010

At the end of the day – I have heard this so many times as a justification for not changing the calculations to the wishes of the checker. It is my favourite for the top spot of engineering phrases. It is totally meaningless really and tries to convey wisdom. Unfortunately, I do say it a lot myself.

Reasonably Well – this is used for analysis that truly reflect real world behaviour. I once had a soils problems of a double row of connected sheet piles exerting active pressure on the soil to the right but I couldn’t understand the results and we had all sorts of nonsense spewing out from the geotechnical experts. This went on for months with me rejecting study after study. One day in a meeting, we were talking about the results again and I was still not happy to commit to the results. We talked trying to find out what was bugging me. Someone said separation and bingo, that was it! The experts were wondering if their Plaxis analysis could show show separation on the rear pile wall. They went away and I got a call the next day from them with great excitement. The new results made sense straight away! Everybody understood what we were looking at in behaviour and response. I understood what Reasonably Well meant.

Rough and ready – This is the first pass, fast fire estimate of material quantities that remains throughout the project as still the best estimate in spite of the extra hours and effort to chase the percentages.

Good enough – what did the Hardy Cross method do to engineers that they would prefer to do a 3D analysis using STAAD with 242 load combinations and 240 pages?  I once had a continuous beam on three supports for a platform, so I did a scribble using the hardy cross method, pleased as punch I still remembered how to do it. An hour later I had an estimate for the beam size and two pages with three load combinations. Same result, good enough for me.

What is your favorite engineering phrase?

Filed under: General Rant

Tags: calculations, civil/structural engineers, spreadsheets