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"I'm a mechanical engineer." Well there's your problem.
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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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That brass hook didn't fracture. It was abraded away to nothing by whatever it was hooked around.
Brass is very soft, and malleable. How a mechanical engineer could not figure this out before hand, I am unsure. I own a brass hammer because it is softer than the metal I strike it against as well as being non sparking. The soft metal ensures the item I hit is less likely to mar or get damaged.
What a shitty engineer.
And at the end of it all, he still blames the place he purchased from instead of a poor material choice to begin with. I wouldn't ask this person to engineer shit.
So infuriating. It didn't "look solid", it looked like fucking brass, which it is, which is why it broke. It's terrifying to think this guy may be out there designing tanks or pressure vessels. Not normally in favour of it but potentially his employer needs to be informed, this guy desperately needs retraining and not doing so could well be a serious safety issue.
This guy must work for Boeing.
These sheets of plywood look solid, and you can glue them together with a hot glue gun real quick into a sturdy box! Imagine how quickly and efficiently we could build hot water tanks this way instead of wasting time, money and space making cylindrical tanks out of welded metal!
These days, those kinds of jobs go to chemical engineers.
Mechanical engineers usually are the kind of 'jack of all trades, master of none.' engineers, which unfortunately means that they fall right into the Dunning-Kruger gap for alot of specific complex technical issues. For me, it is incredible to watch them make a design in Solidworks and yet completely neglect to leave space for hoses and cables. If it isn't simple, they want no part of it. lol
See, I was a structural/mechanical designer up until not that many years ago, and the overwhelming majority of mech engineers I worked with were very competent. Also are you suggesting that a mech. Eng wouldn't specify a bracket off the shelf, it would go to a Chem eng for material selection? Because that's buck wild.
I'm just glad the office I worked for never handed drafting work over to engineers, we had one young guy who came in boasting that he could do the engineering AND the drafting and he didn't last long. Why would the business want to pay him an engineer's salary when I'm in the next chair, being paid half as much and able to do he job faster and better because it's What I Do?! And the crazy thing is I DO think engineers should be better paid than designers/drafters all else being equal. They carry a lot more responsibility and need a lot more education and that should be rewarded! But I still don't want to have to fix up some engineer's gross drawing to look like a professional drew it:p
They usually don't make the same mistake twice, I will give them that, but I have seen younger mechanical engineers do some pretty silly shit.
I was specifically talking about tanks and stuff like that, not like a standard bracket material selection. Most piping and tanks and stuff is either a team of mechanical and chemical or purely chemical, sometimes with a process or controls engineer thrown in depending on how much money is floating around.
That said, my father tells me all of that stuff used to fall within mechanical engineering, with chemical engineering really being limited to Petro, pharma and agriculture.
Still seems weird to have just chemical engineers involved in tank design. I wouldn't expect them to get any real education relevant to tank design, although I never worked with chemical engineers so I could just be unclear on what they do! Guess how much it matters also depends on the tank and application, the tanks I worked on were, for example, multiple gigalitre recycled oil tanks at a port, built on reclaimed swamp (:/) so chemical engineers weren't really relevant at all, but mechanical and structural engineers were vital.
couldn't you say that it abraded way to nothing and then fractured, though or is this me being confused because fracturing is a specific metallurgical phenomenon or something that didn't happen here
Yes, fracturing is a specific term not used for just any failure. There's several terms to describe material failure modes that I'm loosely aware of but at this point wouldn't use without looking them up.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracture_mechanics reference for the curious
I'm going to have to look up how fracture is used here because it doesn't meet a layman's term but maybe it meets some technical definition and we all know about a being technically right.
I would think how you described it is exactly what happened.