Michael

$70-100 per night may be wanton excess, but spending $50/week on beer and pub-food is a wiser investment than “saving†$50/week for auto parts. Drive reliable but inexpensive cars, eat well, and never buy more sophisticated auto parts than you can use in the near-term. Ever since I bought a $2500 Miata, making a whopping 100 hp, I’ve been a lot less concerned about making progress on my “500hp†Z. Now the spare change goes into occasional small luxuries like a tin of caviar or a nice bottle of wine. Much higher smiles-per-dollar than a fancy ignition system that I wouldn’t even hook up until 2019.

If they had a genuinely negative opinion of the car, they would have berated the car itself, and not its national origin. The fact that the insults were directed against Mexico is a sort of back-handed compliment on the car.

Time for the annual update? At some point in the not too terribly distant future, we might have forum members who weren't even born when the site first hit the cyber airwaves!

The romance of snow dissipates quickly. By the second or third storm, the spark is gone, and all that’s left is marital strife. Here in southwest Ohio the total snowfall has been moderate this season, but the cold has been sufficient to maintain almost uninterrupted snow cover from mid-December through the present. The combination of the length of my driveway and my laziness means that it (my driveway) remains unplowed. Yesterday I pulled the M3 out of hibernation for a brief jaunt to get the engine oil warmed up. Well, I ended up getting stuck in my own driveway – had to call AAA to pull me out! My present daily driver, a 1991 Miata, does fine in the snow/sleet/ice with snow tires – light car, decent traction. Even so, rural commutes are unpleasant. Any bridge or overpass could be iced over, and even with moderate snow cover there are drifts onto the roads from the various farm fields. Winter is supposedly a great time to get car work accomplished – but not in an unheated garage! You can bundle up to remain more or less comfortable, but skin sticking to wrenches isn’t a comfy feeling. Gloves, you say? Yes, but gloves soaked in coolant and oil aren’t comfortable either, unless you crave that sticky clammy feeling on your palms.

Now that's a more realistic magazine engine build! These guys bought some nice parts, spending $1800 for some ported AFRs (vs. the $600 Vortecs installed originally)... to lose 18 ft-lb of torque at 3500 rpm. Folks, this is exactly what happens in the real world. Sometimes we cut corners with massaged stock/cheap parts, and the combo works wonderfully. Then we get excited over the possibilities, "upgrade" (at high cost) and end up with inferior results.

I don't see how a Z32 V8 swap would be any easier, cheaper or more "grass roots" than an E36. BTW there is a huge complexity/cost leap between the E36 and E46. In terms of engine bay size and overall simplicity, why not just consider the S30? It used to be that the S130 had an advantage of being "newer", cheaper to source, commanding less of a rarity premium. But in 2011 both S30 and S130 are fairly old cars. Your location is not clear from your signature file, and of course car availability depends strongly on location. In the U.S. Midwest, the S30 and S130 are equally rare. Chassis reinforcement becomes a priority when there is either extensive rust damage, or ambitious horsepower goals involved. For a mild 350 in a reasonably rust-free body, one should probably not worry about chassis reinforcement in any of the Z series. Personally I keep returning to the observation that the hard part is neither accomplishing the swap itself, or finding a suitable vehicle to receive the transplant, but building a strong engine. Lots of people get excited about doing a swap, but if the donor engine is relatively stock, perhaps the better bet would have been mild hotrodding or turbocharging of the stock engine. If you already have your engine sorted out, then the eventual swap candidate is not so important.

What happened to the original poster? Was the car eventually sold, or parted out? Now consider the fellow on the receiving end – the one making the lowball offer. He gets a great deal, right? Maybe not. Let’s call the purchase price $17K. He did not build the car, so he will likely be helpless when something breaks, and would be oblivious to festering ailments. So in a few months he’s looking at a $5000 bill for a proper repair. Either he pays, or gets screwed by an incompetent mechanic –or both. Then what? Then the car sits for a while, and next year is up for sale again. Asking price, $20K. The sale closes at $12K. Then wash, rinse, repeat. After a few circuits on Craigslist, the car hits the junkyard circa 2016, or gets sold for scrap. You know, I started out with a $700 1978 280Z. It had a smidgen of rust, but was otherwise whole, drove well and most of the electrical bits still worked. It started every morning and even the windshield washers worked. I bought it 270 miles from my then-home, drove it back at spirited speeds, and commuted in LA traffic in it for months, before it went under the knife for an engine swap and chassis augmentation. It’s been sitting for 11 years. I’m a reasonably fit person, so when I push my Z, it develops maybe 1/3 hp. The original rating was what, something like 170 hp? So I spent $XX,XXX on losing 169.67 hp. How’s that for depreciation? But annualized over 11 years, that’s not so bad. Now suppose that instead of sinking the money into a hobby car, a conscientious fellow would have invested the money in the stock market. Let’s see, 11 years ago, the S&P 500 was sitting at 1500. Today it’s struggling to reach 1300. Meanwhile, cumulative inflation over the past 11 years has been around 30%. How’s that for an “investment� So therefore I say, the wise man was the fellow who spent $50/week on food and alcohol. He was sated and at least moderately cheerful, on a recurring bases. At least, when you spend money on things that you put into your body, you don’t worry about selling the byproducts for a profit.

All things automotive are astonishingly more expensive overseas than in the U.S… car purchase price, registration, maintenance, gasoline, and so forth. Exhibit A is Singapore. They have a sort of lottery and waiting list for the privilege of being allowed to operate a car on public roads. The price of that “registration stamp†fluctuates with the economy, and since their economy is doing well, that stamp is now astronomically expensive. One of my hosts was driving a Lexus RX350 (the Camry-based SUV)… which cost him $150K Sing (about $110K USD). But incomes, for comparable work, really are not any higher in Singapore than the are in the U.S. Exhibit B is the UK. New cars retail for roughly twice as much as in the U.S. – and that’s after the British Pound declined from $2 USD to its current level of around $1.55 USD. And their gasoline is around 1 Pound per liter….which works out to around $6 at the present exchange rates, with the strong dollar. I am ceaselessly amazed in my travels, how in most of the developed world outside of the US, people earn less money, pay higher taxes, pay more for the same products than we do – and yet, they’re not really in debt and appear to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. How does the arithmetic work out?

Deal-making is a subtle art, and I don’t doubt that savvy shoppers, with a dose of sprightly do-it-yourself enthusiasm, can arrive at a 400 hp engine for under $1000. As with most things, tenacity, cleverness and a dash of good luck will trump a fat wallet. But any decrement of skill/experience/patience, and you’re looking at more money for less performance. “It can be done†is not to be conflated with “it’s straightforward to do for the average amateurâ€. You can easily spend $10,000 and end up with only 250 hp… and eaten cam lobes after 20 miles of driving. Personally I think that $500 for a mostly-complete 350-based SBC is a good deal. Even if the engine eventually grenades or fails to meet desired performance specs, it’s an excellent placeholder until something better arrives. Building a custom engine using new parts is the only way to ensure trouble-free operation, and even that is contingent on good skill and good luck. But then you’re looking at $500 pistons, $600 rods, $1300 heads,… Then there’s the machining: $150 for tanking and leak-checking the block, $200 for boring and honing with torque-plates, $250 for balancing the crank/damper/flywheel, $200 for align-boring the mains, $200 for decking the block, and so forth. So why not just buy a crate engine? Because the crate engine likely has a flat-tappet cam (with specs not to your liking), cheap rockers and pushrods, cheap oilpan and so forth. And has anyone on this board ever successfully collected on a warranty for a non-stock-replacement crate engine? Bottom line: experienced people who know the weak-links can afford to take shortcuts and therefore can save considerable money. The rest of us need to be realistic about the alternative: top-shelf parts for mid-shelf performance.

353049 heads enjoy an excellent reputation amongst OEM cast-iron heads, and their large combustion chamber should work well with a 496 (because of the large swept volume of the stroker). On a 496 with 15cc domed pistons, 0.040†head gasket and pistons set at zero deck height, static compression ratio works out to around 9.7 with the 122cc heads. However, I am tempted to object: if one is willing to afford the cost of a stroker crank, rods and pistons, plus the associated machining and balancing, would it not make more sense to invest in some better aftermarket heads, such as the AFR 315s? I wouldn’t build a modern big block without good aluminum heads and a roller cam.

Shaggy (and everyone), You’re quite right that commonly-accepted usage is not necessarily the grammatically correct usage. In colloquial speech we prefer brevity and simplicity over strict rigor. There are cases where two consecutive prepositions are required, but in common usage they tend to be omitted. Another common error is expunging the infinitive, “to beâ€. Example: “Do you need your rug vacuumed?â€, instead of “Do you need your rug to be vacuumed?†The former is incorrect. I mention this not to be abrasively pedantic, but to point out that (1) some level of ambiguity is unavoidable in written communication, and (2) unflinching enforcement of the rules of English (such as in an internet forum, hint hint....) is ultimately futile and self-defeating.

All three are sufficiently old that none are reliable, trouble-free daily drivers – especially with modifications. All three will require significant attention to suspension bushings, shocks and other wear-items for decent handling; weatherstripping and HVAC overhaul for decent comfort, and so forth. All three will require dealing with rust. My wife daily-drove a Z31 (n/a, automatic, 2-seater with T-tops) until the heating system blew up. It was nothing major – just rotted hoses, which were too difficult to reach. It was a competent car, but did not excel in anything – handling, acceleration, comfort, efficiency. If this is primarily a cruiser and drag car, stick with the Buick; you’ve already made good progress, and familiarity with the baseline vehicle is more important than the ultimate “potential†of the vehicle. Also, consider other swap candidates. Lots of suggests have been sprinkled throughout these forums. Examples of similar age/complexity to those of your original choices include: FC RX7 (the late 80’s model), Miata, E36 BMW, and Mustang (with a Chevy engine!).

This is why, if you're unsure of what you're doing, you should NEVER finish that engine build, and instead leave the engine almost-finished on the stand. It's a great conversation piece, looks beautiful just posing there, and has zero chance of incipient failure.

The original example was incorrect. To assist your Uncle Jack in his effort to dismount from his horse, one should say: "To help your Uncle Jack off of his horse" The salient point is not the comma but the extra preposition, "of".

E36 M3 – easily the best bang for the buck. Good examples can be found for under $5K. I speak from experience here (bought a 1996 M3 coupe with the usual set of mods for $4700 in the spring of 2010). NSX – reputedly superb all-around performer, but good luck finding a decent example at reasonable cost. Z06 – all evidence suggests that the C6 is incomparably superior to the C5. But even the oldest the C6 Z06s are still listing for around $50K. Personally I’d wait another 5 years for a C6 Z06 AMG C55 Benz – V8, thrilling acceleration and great workmanship, but reliability is suspect. I’ve seen Craigslist examples for under $20K. BMW M-coupe – pretty car (in my opinion also) and lighter than E36 M3, but commands a huge cost premium over the M3 (easily 2X), for incremental increase in performance. Porsche – how about a Cayman? Slightly above $25K, but coming down in price. A fellow at work bought a base-model (not “Sâ€) Cayman back in 2007. I drove it briefly. Remarkably easy to drive fast, has just enough acceleration to begin to feel thrilling (comparable to well-sorted E36 M3, maybe a bit faster on the top-end), and refined. Not sure about maintenance costs, though. NA (1990-1997) Miata, with turbocharger and hardtop. Well-sorted examples are selling for $10K (or less) on the turbo Miata forum.

Great to see another Chevy big block in the works! Details on engine build, engine mounting scheme, etc.,...?

There’s “can’t afford†because there is insufficient disposable cash on-hand, and then there’s “won’t afford†because priorities change or the project degenerates into a money pit into which one has no desire to “invest†more money. Some of you guys are used to projects finished within a year or two. A decade-long, or decades-long project seem fantastical and grotesque. But it happens. It may be literally true that you started a project back when your wife was still your girlfriend, and now you have a newborn… who will be a teenager before you finish that roll cage or engine rebuild. Sometimes it takes a year just to assemble a short-block. I was greatly heartened by a recent series of articles in Hot Rod Magazine, about their editor’s Dodge Super Bee… which he bought as a teenager, and still hasn’t finished, now that he’s in his 40s. This is a relatively conventional build (no cross-manufacturer hybrid, no race-oriented chassis mods) by a person with considerable skills and material resources, but limited time and volatile motivation. So it sits for years, then lurches forward, then gets reassembled as the goals and specs change. Meanwhile technology changes too. At one point roller cams and aluminum heads belonged only on race cars; now they’re ubiquitous in the aftermarket. Don’t be surprised if, while your car is on jackstands, the OEMs go through several generations of engines, so that what’s exotic when you began the build, eventually becomes junkyard fodder and then gets all rusted and picked over. Just look at what happened to the Chevy small block 350, from when the JTR book was first written, to the present day. Good luck finding a 350 with a 4-barrel and decent heads in the junkyard. And good luck keeping a Datsun V8 swap to “just a swapâ€â€¦ it’s first and foremost an engine rebuild. So what is the solution? As noted by others already, get a fun and rewarding daily driver. I bought a 1996 BMW M3 for my “nice car†and a 1991 Miata for my “dailyâ€. The M3 is too heavy and the Miata is too anemic, but together they allow me to feel like a “car guy†without excessive remorse that I undertook an intractably ambitious Datsun project. And the more alternative cars you drive, the better you focus your ideas and tastes for what that project car really ought to be once “finishedâ€.

Not having TV at home, but watching British Top Gear from DVDs, I wasn’t even aware when the American version was coming out, or on which channel. But by happenstance I was in a hotel room attending a conference, lackadaisically flipped through the TV channels, and unknowingly came across what must have been American Top Gear. The segment featured a red viper convertible and a Cobra helicopter. It was vaguely amusing for a few minutes, but I kept flipping channels. There is something about British humor that Hollywood just can’t duplicate. It’s not subtlety per se, though certainly there is something about many of the jokes requiring more erudition to appreciate. Maybe it’s breezy liberty of their mainstream broadcast television allowing candor that’s not possible on American commercial TV (echoing Johnc’s comment). Maybe it’s an irreverence that mainstream American culture is still too uptight to tolerate. Whatever. But a few comments, in fairness: - Top Gear Series 1, before James May, had a rather insipid co-host reviewing used cars. This was before the stunts and the fantasy challenges. So even the original Top Gear took some time to evolve. Let’s not be too harsh on the American debut. - A friend of mine attended a live-audience recording. He can’t reveal the contents, but reports that he was pleasantly surprised. - British TV also has “Fifth Gearâ€, which is far less entertaining than Top Gear and is really more of a straight informational car show, like Motorweek on PBS in the 1980s, produced by Maryland Public Televison. So, again, we shouldn’t be too harsh. - The show was good enough to distract me from channel-flipping for at least 5 minutes – and that is no small achievement.

A few thoughts: 1. Much of the reason why swaps become amorphous money-pit perpetual projects is (1) requirements creep, and (2) problems with the engine or the vehicle that have nothing to do with the swap itself. In other words, first ascertain that your vehicle is in good shape. Solve rust issues, get the suspension and brakes to where you like them, get comfortable with everything about the car except maybe for the power. Then, and only then, proceed with the swap. 2. Avoid, if you can, the combined projects of building an engine and doing the swap. Again, many of us with interminable projects really didn’t have all that much trouble in the swap itself (mounts, exhaust, cooling, fuel delivery, etc.), but are stuck with perpetual engine rebuilds. Get a crate engine or a reliable donor, and leave it alone until the swap itself is more or less complete. 3. Contracting with a shop is all about reputation. Price, after a point, is a secondary consideration. Especially with a long-distance-relationship (Columbus to Chicago?), references and site visits are crucial. 4. I farmed out the roll cage, structural work and many other aspects of my build to a shop, back in 1999-2000. Overall I am very happy with the shop’s workmanship and have no regrets about paying the money. They guy did a masterful job at welding, and integration of complex systems. But nearly everything else that I’ve subsequently done myself has been a disaster! The moral here is that unless you go the 100% turnkey route (very expensive and not without its own pitfalls!), what the shop does for you is only the baseline. From then on, it’s the care and feeding of a custom, high-performance car, which is fraught with risk and frustration. 5. The downside of not building it yourself is that you’re helpless when things go wrong… see above. You can indeed save time and money on the front-end by contracting out the swap, but may lose time and money on the back end as you wrestle with the beast that’s just been built for you. 6. LS-series vs. traditional Chevy V8: no factory mass-produced Gen-1 or Gen-2 engine will have satisfying performance in stock form. Therefore a Gen-1 or Gen-2 means an aftermarket build… cam, intake, heads, etc. This can still be cheaper than an LS. While apples-to-apples comparison is difficult, the built Gen-1 or 2 (I mean the LT1 etc.) can conceivably have more power than the LS… or not. It all depends. However, the built engine will required more hands-on attention once you become the proud owner, whether or not your engine was professionally built. Back to 4 and 5 above. I am geographically close to you and will send a PM.

In an attempt to offer some belated but hopefully nevertheless useful summarizing thoughts…. The above post is exactly right. There’s a culture to academia – some of it is predatory, while some is entirely explicable from the constraints placed on professors and the institutions themselves. Competition is not inimical to collaboration. Both are vital towards making progress. I would argue that if professors genuinely competed as lecturers for students’ attention, then lectures would be more informative. 90% failure rates would disappear in a true academic marketplace, as the consumers (the students) would penalize institutions that greedily take their tuition money and peremptorily hand out swaths of failing grades. So sometimes it is precisely the lack of competition that results in punitive and unnecessarily rough practices. But we must realize that training for a career is different from a ladder for selecting champions. It is one thing for engineers to compete for the honor and responsibility of being chief engineer on some large construction project, or similarly, for firms to bid on a competitive basis for that project. This is how such awards ought to be made – and not by central planning, bribery or collusion. But it is quite another thing to line up the students in rank-order of their academic performance, and to dismiss the back 90% of the line. Healthy competition reinforces the pursuit of excellence. But competition as an inveterate end in itself degenerates into a jungle brutality, producing bleeding losers and truculent winners – who themselves may become losers at any moment if fortune fails them. Tony is quite correct that academic success is not an entitlement program; shoddy studying should not be coddled, and lack of preparation is not the responsibility of the professor to overcome through extra attention or of dumbing-down the overall level of instruction. But pointing out the inevitability of hardships in life is no excuse for bombastic remonstration. The very fact that Josh asked for advice is commendable. Let’s leave the injunction to “man up†for second-rate political debates. Let’s also not overlook the crucial role of luck. Yes, I did study hard – but I was lucky that my parents moved into a jurisdiction with great schools, and was even luckier to be precisely in the generational cohort when a public magnet school was established, drawing the best teachers and students (both, I ought to add, on a competitive basis). That school made college a comparative breeze. But things could have turned out very differently. Had I been raised in the jurisdiction where I now reside, I might have turned out like my neighbors – of whom maybe 1/6th have even an undergraduate degree, and many dropped out of high school. Having just spent some time abroad and surveyed the academic situation in various Asian countries, I’m overcome by a realization that whereas American colleges do fairly well in comparison with foreign counterparts, K-12 schools – and especially high schools – are abysmally behind. A kid with the equivalent of a high-school diploma in Europe or Asia is 2-3 years ahead academically relative to his typical American counterpart. College, especially in engineering and the physical sciences, has to make up the gap. So our universities in America really have to pour the knowledge through a fire-hose, to get the students to a globally-competitive level. Actually, even a B.S.E. degree does not offer parity – that’s only achieved in grad school. Advance Josh’s situation by 4 years, and something similar happens: American grad students struggle in the first year of grad school, while students with academic degrees from Europe who study for their engineering Ph.D. in America just breeze through the first-year classes of grad school. But to be fair, in many countries an engineering degree takes 5 or 6 years; 4-year college is an American invention, and the engineering community perennially debates whether our engineering undergraduate curriculum should not, in fact, be extended to a full 5 years. So, the point: engineering is tough, and there are legitimate reasons why it should be tough. It should be a challenge, but it shouldn’t be torture. To the poster who asked about Mark Drela – yes, we’re well acquainted.

Update: I bought a Jegs rod bolt stretch gauge and checked all of the bolts. I recall that the four rearmost bolts (cylinders 7 and 8) were torqued to 65 ft-lbs, while the others “probably†where not. MSD’s specs for the rod bolts in question are 50 ft-lbs and 0.0063†stretch. Well, when all bolts are torqued to 50 ft-lbs, I obtain the following stretch values: - the four rearmost bolts: stretch between 0.0065 and 0.0075 (approximately) - the other twelve bolts: stretch between 0.0055 and 0.0060 (also approximately). I say “approximately†because it is difficult to maintain the gauge on the bolt head and shaft dimples in a repeatable manner, and the stretch gauge can not remain installed while the nut is torqued with a socket wrench. Every checking of bolt stretch therefore requires removal of the tool during the tightening sequence. And that introduces possible biases. Based on this, I chose to button everything up and to get the engine running in “limp†mode, which for me means < 4000 rpm and only with the 20+ year old street tires currently installed. If I can obtain a decent tune –a feat never before achieved – I’ll declare victory, mothball the engine over the winter, and in the spring will disassemble it to replace the rod bolts. BTW the top piston rings, as it turns out, were installed backwards (wrong side up) and that has likely resulted in cylinder wear. If the engine grenades even during its planned mild exercises, hopefully I can save the heads, cam and valvetrain, and will replace the bottom end with a 496-type of assembly. Currently I’m looking at a reassembled engine ready to install back in my Z. The only missing piece is an ignition system, about which I’ll be posting shortly.

Grass is always greener on the other side! Yes, Northern European drivers are more polite and more obedient… especially in Germany. In England the speed limit is 70 mph, and radar cameras are everywhere, especially around London. Driving in Paris is abysmally confusing and the drivers are marginally polite at most. Belgium is OK, Netherlands are well-organized but traffic is heavy. Norway has ridiculously low speed limits, even in the boondocks – and as with everything in Norway, prices for speeding tickets are outrageous. Rural northern France is pleasant, but 130 kph limit. On the bright side, the highway toll both attendants are often absolutely gorgeous girls! Then there’s Asia. Indonesia is a mess. India – oh my god, utterly incomprehensible porridge of madness! The “tiger†countries (Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and so forth) are well-organized and law-obedient, but again, speed limits are low and traffic cameras are predatory. American drivers are not highly skilled and are often distracted. But are roads are wide, easy to navigate, well-marked and generally in good repair. And at least when you get a speeding ticket, you get “personal service†from a cop… not a camera owned by Lockheed Martin!

The starting salary in aerospace engineering has some dependency on the prestige of the school, but an even greater dependency on your grades and overall resume. A 3.8 from a minor state school is more attractive to employers than a 2.8 from MIT or Caltech. After the first 3-5 years of employment (or graduate school), your undergraduate record is almost irrelevant. College does have a responsibility to adequately train the next generation of professionals, and that includes, in part, weeding out those who are clearly unwilling or unable to perform. But this is not eugenics or the Olympic trials. School is not easy, but it should not be torture. The professors are not concentration camp guards, signing thumbs up or thumbs down on who lives or dies. Look, the whole point of civilization is that we come together to specialize, to assist one another, to train the next generation and to nurture the transfer of ideas. It is not a tournament ladder, where “losers†are systematically culled for the improvement of the breed. It is just utterly asinine to suggest that college ought to be some sort of Darwinian machine for extirpation of the unfit. There are still public high schools in America that offer a rigorous education and thorough preparation for college. I was not in the highest elite of my high school graduating class, yet I found no difficulty in college and was fortunate in using AP credit to jump into the upper-level classes. I found no palpable gaps in my knowledge, relative to that of my peers. Of course, that was just the book-knowledge. Street-smart knowledge, human relations, that sort of thing – oh boy, that was a tawdry disaster. The “real world†is actually in many regards more relaxed and more tolerant than college. It is difficult to fake one’s way through demanding courses, but in the “real worldâ€, presentation (good writing skill, good interpersonal skills) are at least as important as fundamental knowledge, technical acumen or math aptitude. Generalists suffer in engineering school, but thrive in the workplace. The American work culture rewards “big picture†planning and “visionâ€, while comparatively denigrating the slide-rule and punch-card set. Engineers rise in the hierarchy not because they’re great engineers, but because they are deft communicators and resourceful planners. To be sure, they can not be outright incompetent – but the stands for that are quite modest. Engineering is a little weird because it is both undergraduate education and professional training. Medical doctors, lawyers and the like are required to have postgraduate training, while engineers can and generally do practice as professionals with only a BSE. So from the academic viewpoint, there is a tension in what to teach: “how†to think, or “what†to think? My view is that engineering school has the primary objective of teaching students how to absorb information, how to study on their own from textbooks and the available literature, and most importantly, how to use intuition rather than calculation to arrive at reasonable estimates about physical problems. So there it is, in the proverbial nutshell: you go to engineering school to hone your engineering intuition. Where I think that much of the present controversy stems, is from the demographic self-selection of the readership of HybridZ. Who modifies old cars? Folks with hands-on skills and the mechanic’s acumen – and not necessarily “book smartsâ€. We can’t be experts in all things. And normally the folks who are expert with the welder and the drill press are not expert with the calculus book. There are of course some brilliant exceptions, but you see my overall point… there is the sliderule engineering and then there is the lathe and anvil engineering. HybridZ, to a large point, caters to the latter. Now when people reach a level of hands-on mechanical skill where they are genuine innovators and not merely wrench-turners, this leads them to the theory side of engineering. And sometimes that turn of events is not entirely favorable. Unfortunately, engineering education begins with the theory as a point of departure, and only later circles back to the hands-on stuff. Graduate school in engineering can be very hands-on… almost like shop-lab. But to get there, you have to slog through the math. So I say again, if you have the genuine motivation for engineering, suffer through the “weeding†period and emerge on the sunnier side. But if engineering was a passing fad, drop it to stop the suffering. As for what I do… perhaps it is better not to delve into personal details on the internet, but in sum, I work in a research lab in the public sector. My field is the aerodynamics of small unmanned air vehicles, with focus on the physics of lift and drag. I run a facility called a water tunnel (like a wind tunnel, but uses water) equipped with various force measurement and speed measurement devices. Experiments include “forced oscillationsâ€, where models (such as wings) are moved through prescribed trajectories while the flowfield and resulting forces are measured, and then compared with theoretical and computational models. That’s the in-house research part of my job. I mentor several junior engineers who do various calculations and operate some of the lab equipment. Another part of my job is writing proposals, reviewing other people’s proposals, advising decision makers on what to fund and what to plan in future research budgets. I write papers in the professional literature (principally in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or AIAA). I collaborate with professors from several universities and with colleagues from other public-sector labs. I am also involved in occasional flight test and wind tunnel test projects, but more as a planner and evaluator than as the test operator. In all, most of my work involves reading, writing, speaking and generating conceptual ideas – rather than doing math or physics. But, I rely on the intuition build in college and grad school, without which it would have been impossible to make the planning decisions or engineering estimates. Essentially, I get paid for exercising that intuition and for conveying my ideas in what’s hopefully a cogent and persuasive manner. Oh, and then there’s the paperwork!

A few points. By way of background, I was an aerospace engineering undergrad in 1990-1993, then did the graduate school thing, and have since been in aerospace research. I do not teach, but occasionally give lectures, advise grad students, and collaborate with aerospace professors on various research projects. 1. There are “weed-out†classes, but 90% failure rate is unconscionable. 50% occasionally happens, but 90% is obscene. If this genuinely happens, complain to the department chairman, or the dean. Faculty who fail 90% of their students will have trouble from their superiors. The occasional big man on campus can rock the boat if he brings in lots of grant money, but for most professors it’s just plain idiotic to treat their students so roughly. Something just does not make sense here. 2. Upper-level engineering classes are conceptually more complex than the lower-level, of course, but the raw level of problem solving skills is actually less acute. What I mean by that is, you will be using more sophisticated machinery, but the stressing of your problem-solving skill is in some regards actually less. What does that mean? It means that if you struggle through the first two years, then the final two years are actually less stressful. 3. You said that you’ve taken calculus in high school. Did you take the AP exam? What was your score? If you scored “3†or higher, there is no reason not to be getting at least a B. Again, something is just plain wrong here. 4. If you genuinely like engineering, stick with it. Almost certainly things will get better. If engineering was just a passing fancy or a toss-up between several viable alternatives, switch now. If you feel that you conceptually understand the material, but your grades do not reflect your knowledge, stick with it. If however you feel that you’re not learning in class – just going through the motions – this could be a sign that your approach is wrong. 5. The “rate my professor†service is not to be taken seriously. It is entirely possible that high-rated professors do not deserve their rating, and vice versa. Often the most committed teachers only receive mediocre reviews. The most common complaints is that “professor XYZ is too theoreticalâ€, or “he assumes too sophisticated of a backgroundâ€. But an intense instructor is not the same as a teapot despot, an ******* or a “researcher†who finds teaching to be merely a perfunctory chore. Sometimes freshmen can’t tell the difference… and the more irate ones bother to post on ratemyprofessor, skewing the results. 6. In a big state school with a research bent, the freshman classes are the lowest priority of any function on campus. Expect to be treated like dirt – it’s unfair, but unavoidable. 7. The ideas of calculus are quite important in engineering practice, but the calculations themselves are rare, and are generally automated. You need to understand limits, derivatives, series, integration, special-functions, matrices, and the like (I’m mixing 1st and 2nd year math here), but you will almost never write out calculations on a sheet of paper. It’s all computerized. 8. Indeed a good plan is to take calc/chem/physics at a community college and transfer those credits. Community colleges are notorious for being “easy†(lax standards), but teaching freshman is their bread and butter, and classes are smaller. If you are having trouble on their placement exam, most likely your school didn’t prepare you sufficiently and you should consider taking a step back. This brings me to my main point: 9. Dis-enroll (do NOT drop out!) from UTA and spend a year at the community college. Take pre-calc, basic physics and general chemistry. Then take their calc sequence. Either that gets transferred to UTA, or you would have an advantage if you are forced to retake those classes. By the way, in product-design engineering (industry) – whatever that means – perhaps the engineering job differs markedly from school. But in research – government and academia – engineering work is very much like engineering school, except that the problems are broader, more amorphous and harder to pin down, while the available tools are more sophisticated.

The easiest approach is to compose one’s posts within word-processing software. This not only tracks spelling and grammar (or if you prefer, “grammerâ€), but is also useful as a diary of one’s posts. Mine may hardly be worth saving, but I have files with most of my posts, going back to February 2000.