Mechanical

Making Things Differently: Additive Manufacturing and Composite Primary Structure

Three milestones that broke the link between geometric complexity and cost, and then took three decades each to reach certified service.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Materials for a Harder Duty: Stainless Steel, Light Alloys and Synthetic Polymers

Five materials milestones that each removed a constraint designers had treated as fixed: corrosion, weight, fibre supply, glazing cost and the stiffness penalty of mass.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Materials That Built the Modern World: Steel, Plastics and Engineered Timber

How the Bessemer converter, the first synthetic polymers and engineered wood products replaced found material properties with specified, warranted ones.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Measurement and Method: Instruments, Mathematics and Experimental Science

Seven milestones in roughly a century, after which an engineer could calculate in advance what had previously only been learned by building.

Moving People and Goods: Transport Engineering 1845-1950

A structured reference series covering nineteen milestones in marine, road and rail engineering over the century in which transport became a question of running economically and…

Mechanical12 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Power Screw Design

Designing power and translation screws: thread forms and proportions, helix and friction angles, raising and lowering torque, self-locking and overhauling, efficiency, collar fr…

Power to the Water: Screw Propulsion, Expansion Engines and Oil Firing

Four milestones in which marine propulsion moved from consuming most of the ship to leaving room for the cargo that paid for it.

Pressure, Speed and Escape: Jet Airliners, Supersonic Flight and Spaceflight

Four milestones from a two-second rocket flight to a lunar landing, and one fatigue failure that changed how every aircraft since has been certified.

Prime Movers: The Internal Combustion Engine and Diesel-Electric Traction

Spark ignition against compression ignition, why compression ratio governs efficiency, and how diesel-electric traction solved the transmission problem by deleting it.

Roller Chain Drive Selection

Selecting a precision roller chain drive: sprocket tooth counts, application and tooth factors, selection power, rating chart failure modes, chain length in pitches and exact ce…

Rolling Element Bearing Selection

How to size deep groove ball, self-aligning ball, cylindrical roller and spherical roller bearings using ISO basic rating life, equivalent dynamic load, and the minimum load and…

Shaft Coupling Selection

Selecting rigid and flexible shaft couplings: the four misalignment conditions, load classification, service and start factors, equivalent selection power at the reference speed…

Shafts, Keys, Circlips and Seals

Standard bright steel shaft and key sizes, shaft materials, key and keyway stress rules, circlip types and thrust limits, and the selection of rotary shaft seals.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 25 min read

SOLIDWORKS Administration in Practice

A practical reference for administering a SOLIDWORKS environment — platform requirements, deployment images, licence management, PDM architecture, standards governance, upgrade …

SOLIDWORKS Automation: Macros, API & Task Scheduling

Levels of SOLIDWORKS automation and where each fits, worthwhile targets and what not to automate, unattended batch work, treating automation as software with ownership and versi…

SOLIDWORKS Backup, Restore & Disaster Recovery

The three PDM backup artefacts and why synchronisation matters more than coverage, the non-vault artefacts routinely left out of scope, automation and monitoring, recovery scena…

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 10 min read

SOLIDWORKS Deployment Methods & System Options Governance

Delivering SOLIDWORKS to a fleet: the three deployment methods and their rights and upgrade profiles, rollout sequencing and pilot design, and a defensible policy for which syst…

SOLIDWORKS File References, Search Paths & Data Portability

How SOLIDWORKS references resolve, which ordinary file operations break the reference graph, governing in-context references and duplicate filenames, and choosing formats for tr…

SOLIDWORKS Governance, Standards Register & Change Control

Sustaining a CAD environment: dividing responsibility between engineering and IT, the standards register and what belongs in it, change control by reversibility, the annual revi…

SOLIDWORKS Licence Models & Entitlement Planning

Choosing between standalone and network licensing for SOLIDWORKS, how base tiers and add-in entitlements are consumed, and how to size a pool from measured usage rather than ass…

SOLIDWORKS Materials, Drafting Standards & Units

The third standards layer: building a verified custom material library, holding a modified drafting standard as a controlled external file, setting units and precision consisten…

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 13 min read

SOLIDWORKS Network Licence Administration

Administering the SOLIDWORKS network licence manager: server placement and ports, the options file and its control categories, idle reclaim, borrowing policy, consumption order,…

SOLIDWORKS Operating Environment Configuration

Configuring the operating environment around SOLIDWORKS: operating system support lifecycle, antivirus exemptions, graphics driver policy, account rights, path conventions and t…

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 13 min read

SOLIDWORKS PDM Architecture & Server Topology

The three PDM server roles and where data physically lives, the local vault view as cache rather than storage, topology and storage sizing, database edition consequences, prereq…

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 13 min read

SOLIDWORKS PDM Implementation & Legacy Data Migration

Running a PDM implementation as a change programme: phasing and where effort actually goes, deciding migration scope, pre-migration cleansing, preserving reference integrity thr…

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 14 min read

SOLIDWORKS PDM Vault Configuration: Workflows, States & Permissions

Designing a PDM workflow from the engineering change process: states and transitions, revision schemes, the layered permission model, data card variable mapping, transition cond…

SOLIDWORKS Performance Diagnosis & Troubleshooting

A diagnostic method for SOLIDWORKS performance complaints: isolating the workstation, model, network and server layers, the two-test triangulation, common causes at each layer, …

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 …

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

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 …

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…

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.

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.

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.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

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.

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.

Mechanical4 Aug 2026 · 10 min read

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…