For engineers who already know the math—but still lose projects. For the last few years, I’ve been sharing technical guides here on Mechanical Design Handbook —how to size a motor, how to calculate fits, and (as you recently read) how to choose between timing belts and ball screws. But after 25 years in industrial automation, I realized something uncomfortable: Projects rarely fail because the math was wrong. They fail because: The client changed the scope three times in one week. A critical vendor lied about a shipping date (and no one verified it). The installation technician couldn’t fit a wrench into the gap we designed. University taught us the physics. It didn’t teach us the reality. That gap is why I wrote my new book, The Sheet Mechanic . This is not a textbook. It is a field manual for the messy, political, and chaotic space between the CAD model and the factory floor. It captures the systems I’ve used to survive industrial projec...
Figure 1: The Quest for Free Energy. Perpetual motion machines inevitably fail because energy lost to friction (Entropy) cannot be recovered in a closed system. The Quest for Free Energy Perpetual motion describes "motion that continues indefinitely without any external source of energy." For centuries, engineers, inventors, and charlatans have tried to build machines that produce more energy than they consume. While the idea is romantic—a machine that runs forever and powers our homes for free—there is a rigorous scientific consensus that perpetual motion in an isolated system is physically impossible. Search for Best Books on Thermodynamics Advertisement The Physics: Why They Always Stop To understand why these machines fail, we don't need complex calculus. We just need to understand two fundamental laws of the universe. 1. First Law (You Can't Win) Energy cannot be created or d...