How many Engineer(ooz) are here?

That's good to hear Gary, I really enjoy designing things too from Formula SAE car bodywork, my thesis car suspension, furniture and also my steering wheel setup. Never liked having to draft all the little details though!
I was quite young back when the Sydney Olympics was in town, what sort of construction went into the bicycle frame's design? Did it use aero-profile chromoly tube or was CFRP already being used back then?

Frame was constructed from layers of carbon fibre, with one single complete kevlar layer (as a safety feature). The purpose of the kevlar layer was to hold it all together in the case of an accident (carbon fibre only prototypes produced very sharp edges/fragments when broken or snapped). Structural points like bottom brackets and headstems had co-moulded chrome-moly or aluminium parts for strength/interfacing.

Frames were produced from a split die (with slides) for external surfaces, and an air filled bladder to produce the internal surfaces.

This frameset is currently being sold by Bike Technologies Australia as the 'BT Stealth'.

Im working as a RF engineer. I think 9-10 years experience? Starting to lose track.

Got a Bach of Engineering in electronics (graduated with honours).

What can I say? Most people who go into engineering and stay there are in it for the design, technical side of things and not really the money. Unless your able to run your own company (civil is probably the easiest), you end up hit a salary limit pretty quickly. My wife earns a lot more in IT, even though she works 1 day less too!

Im personally bored out of my brain in my current job / industry. I really should have done mechanical engineering, but I didn't have a clue when I was deciding what I really wanted to do, just that I was keen to do engineering. Also, be aware engineering degrees although often easy enough to get into are one of the toughest to pass, only 10% of my class made it through without failing something.

My biggest piece of advice is take the time to find something you are passionate about, even if that means taking 6-12 month break from school. Its such a big decision, although you can go back, its easier to get it right in the first place

My 2c.

Yeah definitely seen plenty of sharp carbon fibre shards from F1, also remember working with kevlar for the under floor of the FSAE car for anti protrusion protection.. it was a complete pain to cut to size even with the sharpest tailoring scissors. I know one of the guys from the FSAE team now also has a startup bike frame company combining carbon tubes with 3D printed titanium bottom brackets and fixtures etc. Would you be receiving something like royalties for every BT Stealth frame sold?

I've definitely seen my fair share of pretenders who go into an engineering degree for the money.. some people either make no effort to understand the problems or just have absolutely no clue what's going on and go around asking for someone else's assignments to copy. Those who somehow graduate usually end up in another industry altogether which seems like a total waste of time, not to mention when they're in your project group
One of the toughest mechanical subjects to pass was thermodynamics where apparently 50% of the class failed every year. However it's just slightly different/new concepts compared to mechanics and contains very important concepts that are good to know/understand. Personally my motivation to understand vehicle dynamics and know what/how to setup the suspension to improve lap times/tyre wear etc pulled me through my degree, GT6 was my excuse for practicing/experimenting with new tuning ideas
Deciding what career path to choose straight out of high school is a really big ask and even though I went straight into my degree, I truly did not know what I wanted to do until a couple years later. I'd recommend taking time off to think it through and tick things off the 'to do' list so that you won't become easily distracted when you finally start your degree.

My first graduate job I worked at Hatch, started off based at one of Alcoa's alumina refineries (Hatch had an alliance with Alcoa at the time), was doing a bit of project management plus some hydraulic calcs, I enjoyed doing the calcs and told my manager I wanted to be more involved in the technical side. After about 18 months there I was rotated into another position in Hatch's Perth office, a group of about 8 mechanical engineers that basically handled any technical work in Perth. Most of it involved pressure vessel design and FEA. After the GFC hit, I was pretty much the only one left in the group apart from a couple of managers, and I sort of became the go-to man for anything pressure vessel or FEA related and I've always enjoyed it. Since then I've worked at 2 small consultancies who both specialise in FEA.
The workload has always been fairly steady, even through bad times which is one of the good things about it. During these sort of depressions, companies are looking at how they can cut costs, keep equipment operating for longer without replacing it etc, so FEA can save literally millions of dollars of replacing something if you can prove that it's still fit for service. I guess that's why there's always a demand for it.

Yeah those wheels were done in Abaqus, although I have more experience using Ansys as well.
It was modeled using solid elements. Prototype versions of the wheels had been build while we were analysing them, so we were able to compare a number of stiffness tests to our model results, as well as strain gauging. Surprisingly they correlated extremely well.

So, today was the big day for me. Today was the day i got to test my electric bike which i had been building over the course of a year at school for Engineering Studies. The bike ran solidly, and i was very happy with the performance and battery life i was getting out of it. I would upload a few pictures here, but i don't know how too, so for the moment, that's unavailable. There is some good news regarding my bike too. The bike was quickest in its class (part of that i want to put down to my Motorsports brain which allowed me to pull of some spectacular overtakes), regardless, I was very happy with the way it ran and the way it works. So come end of the year after i have finished my final exams, i shall bring my project home and likely be riding it up and down the street a few times. Those of you who live in Perth around the Stirling/Balcatta area, be on the look out for a bright blue electric bike riding by in the coming months, it'll likely be me. All in all, very happy with the project i have built, and the mark i have received for it.

Now that this project is complete though, i certainly look forward to the next step in my path. Formula SAE cars at Uni, and then hopefully onto the bigger and better race cars

I'm an electronics engineer, but professional progression (and moving to Australia) put me on the IT management path. Started as field engineer for a medical equipment company, then technical account manager and now service delivery manager.
Can't fix or design anything with electronic components anymore, but that's how things sometimes go. Almost 12 years experience under my belt now...

Agree with Luke about choosing a career based on your passion, if you do it for the money, sooner or later you will get frustrated. If you love what you do it will be easier to find ways to make money happen, so don't let it be a driving factor to choose your career or your first few jobs. Go for the jobs where you learn and put you on the path you want, as with time you can't help feeling a bit stuck where you end up.

Sounds like you had a lot more fun, hands on projects in engo studies than I remember.. all we got to build were small foam glider planes and a pasta bridge.. mine weighed something like 100g but didn't break until loaded with 9kg of masses .
To post pictures you have to upload them to a file or photo sharing site like imgur, photobucket, etc and paste the direct image link into the 'insert image' tool next to the smilies.

It was a lot of fun for sure. The great thing about my school is that we like to be very hand on and spend as much time in the workshop as possible, which means we can build things like the bike. Sometimes it means we lack time regarding theory or design, but we can always put in the effort at home

Cheers Bob, will try and upload some photos of the bike a bit later

Been meaning to post these photos for a long time now, but here are a couple of picture of the electric bike i built at school as part of my engineering studies project

My job title is "Systems Engineer" so I guess I count .
I work in the PBX industry dealing with Networking and Phone systems. Lots of boring stuff looking at IP traces and changing names on phone systems. Not a sexy as some of the stuff that you chaps to get a look at.

@Nathancarhead my friend who is an electrical engineering student also built his own E-Bike, thing is nuts gets up to 80ks I think. So much fun to ride. He uses it to commute around Christchurch and from memory I think it has about a 50km range, I may be wrong on that though.

Any other Telco/Networking engineers on here?

Telco/Netops here... kinda.
Decided I didn't really want to head down that path as I really couldn't care less about having a career.
So long as I make enough money to comfortably raise my family that's all I care about.

Been in Desktop Support for the last 9 odd years, with a year break helping out my brother in his elect. engineering business. Mainly systems consulting/designing and a bit of ELV work. The end of that year could have seen me as part of the team that would have made the Asia Pacific expansion, but it just meant too much travelling at a time when we were about to expand our little family.

Now I'm back in my old support role, but with a bit more focus on server/network, back-end work with the department I'm in.
As mentioned above, there is no thought of career progression/ambition in my life, and I like it that way.
As long as these stupid idiot directors stay away from me, I'm happy

Im as telco as they come. Work for Ericsson, currently building the NBN network. Have also worked for all 4 (although only 3 now) operators networks in Australia. Massive over supply of engineers due to redundancies over the last few years. Probably be another 10 or so years before we are in demand again, but I dont know if I'll hang around for that. Currently working out what I really want to do (aside from racing cars ), and then might go back to study if its not an option within the telco industry.

Does software engineering count ? I often find the use of that term a little dubious, it's not the most mature form of engineering that is for sure. But, I've been working on Air Traffic Control systems for about 10 years. Job before that was embedded refrigeration control. I try not to count how long I have been making software.

By software engineering you mean bug introduction and resolution engineering right?

Being ATC, I'd hope he is fairly competent in his coding

Sure as hell hope so!

Mines rock solid My job is a lot about making sure everyones is even when the squeeze is on. There a heap of testing that happens before they go live.