Yeah, Deming is well known by anyone who has worked extensively in engineering and mfg in the past 30+yrs. IMO, lots of companies still don't get it right. I remember a company I used to work for tried to implement Continuous Improvement and Kaisen principles, While they did make some good policies at the shop level, they were clueless on what that should mean for the engineering level. They instituted policies on how many pens, erasers, notepads, etc., each engineer should keep in their drawers, how many poster we can put on our walls, how many coffee runs and toilet trips per day, and that sort of nonsense. All in the name for efficiency. Absolutely moronic. Of course, most of us just went...
yeah right, and disregarded it all. It's about as Dilbert/Dogbert as it gets.
Anyhow, about German engineering... I was so intrigued by it back in my school days I actually took German for 3yrs, both in HS and in college, to better understand German culture. Much like Japan, a lot of their engineering prowess is imbued with many of the idiosyncrasies of their cultural identity and spirit. When I was in grad school, I had a German exchange student as a housemate. When he first moved in, he found the desk to be much too low for his stature, being some 6ft 2 or 3. I told him, hey... no problem, I've got some leftover 2x4s in the garage, we can just cut a few sticks to fit, and he'd be good to go. He thought about it for a sec, then looked around the kitchen, and picked up a whole bunch of aluminum coke cans we had in our recycling bag. I help him bring all the cans up to his room, lift up the desk and placed rows of coke cans under the desk. Voila! Perfect height for him. Not at all what I would've done, but, it did the job.
About my K1600GT... the engine is a marvel of engineering. An inline6 that is turbine smooth, but not much wider than the typical inline4 engine found in that class of sport touring motorcycles. It had a rather peculiar "dry" sump system. Instead of the separate oil reservoir, BMW incorporated it into the engine block, stacked under the crankcase oil pan. So... in order to drain both sumps, you'd first have to remove the drain plug to the lower sump, and let the oil drain out. Then you insert a long hex bit in through the drain pan to remove the drain plug to the inner sump. Sounds easy enough, but the whole affair just turns into a big oil mess, no matter how you try it. And it doesn't help that the BMW engineers spec'ed a hex head on the inner drain plug that was wayyy too shallow, which made it difficult for the hex bit to grab, especially when it's drenched in engine oil. The whole debacle actually spawned an
aftermarket for modified inner drainplugs, to make R&R easier.
From an engineering POV, that design is rather ingenious... reducing component count and overall weight. However, from the POV of person having to service it, it is an absolute nightmare. I see it from both POVs, and I'm sympathetic to both. It's the kind of WTF that makes mechanics despise engineers.
