ASME Western Washington Section
January 2008 Newsletter
Contents:
Attention: Paper Copies of Newsletter
to Be Discontinued!
The number of members who receive a hard (paper)
copy of the newsletter has declined dramatically in recent
years, and we no longer send enough to qualify for good
bulk mail rates. As a result, the paper newsletters are
a high-cost activity that serves a very small segment of
the membership, and the executive board has discussed eliminating
them for several years. Of the 2007 Member Survey respondents
who indicated that they receive the newsletter in paper
format, not one had attended a single section activity in
the previous year, suggesting that no major change in participation
will result from the paper mailings being eliminated. Members
who would like to continue receiving the newsletter in electronic
format should visit http://my.asme.org and update their
profiles with a valid e-mail address.
Lean Manufacturing Certificate Program
Green River CC in Auburn, WA
January 7-9 and 14-15
The Lean Manufacturing program consists of
five workshops: Intro To Lean Manufacturing, Kaizen and
Kaizen Event Implementation, 5S and the Visual Workplace,
Waste Reduction and Creating Standard Work, and Mistake
Proofing and Set-up Reduction. For more info, visit http://www.sections.asme.org/westernwa/training.asp.
Georgetown Steam Plant/Georgetown
Powerplant Museum Tour
January 16, Wednesday
Our January meeting will feature a tour of
the Georgetown Steam Plant/Georgetown Powerplant Museum.
Please note that this tour is on a Wednesday, not the traditional
Tuesday night for our meetings. The tour will be on 16 January
from 6 pm to 8 pm. The Georgetown Steam Plant, a surprisingly
complete and operable steam power plant after a career of
nearly seventy-five years, was built in the early 1900s
when Seattle's inexpensive hydroelectric power attracted
manufacturers. Much of the power produced at this plant
operated the streetcars. It marks the beginning of the end
of the reciprocating steam engine's domination in the growing
field of electrical energy generation for lighting and power.
The plant's three Curtis turbines, manufactured
by the General Electric Company between 1906 and 1917, represent
the first two generations of this American innovation. The
design of the Curtis turbines established the steam turbine
as a practical and compact prime mover, capable of producing
large amounts of power. The Curtis steam generator was smaller,
had three times the power, and operated more cheaply and
smoothly than current-day generators.
The plant was built in 1906 for the Seattle
Electric Company. Puget Sound Traction and Lighting Company
(now Puget Power) bought the Seattle Electric Company in
1912. The plant supplied power to the Seattle-to-Tacoma
Interurban and Seattle streetcars as well as residential
and industrial power to Georgetown. Unlike many early boiler
plants originally designed to burn coal and later converted
to oil or gas, the Georgetown Plant began as an oil-fired
plant only to be converted to a coal-fired plant in 1917
when oil had been in short supply. Fortunately, the plant
had already made provisions for coal firing in the original
design so all that was needed was conveyors and ash removal
facilities.
According to a Seattle Steamer (newsletter
of the Seattle Boiler Inspection Unit) article: "In
April of 1995, the Georgetown Powerplant Museum was founded
by Paul Carosino and Lilly Tellefson to restore, maintain
and operate the Georgetown Steam (Power) Plant as a dynamic
museum and teaching facility. They, along with a number
of occasional and regular volunteers have been working to
restore the plant and each piece of equipment."
Directions: located on the northwest corner
of King County Airport/Boeing Field, at 6605 13th Avenue
South,
Seattle. Please RSVP to Rachel Wittrock by 5 p.m. on Thursday,
10 January. Her contact points are wittrockr2@asme.org or
by phone at 206-544-9810, with the former preferred.
Lean Office Class
Green River CC in Auburn, WA
January 16, Wednesday
This intensive 4-hour course will outline
how to apply Lean principles to the administrative functions
of your business to help you identify and reduce wait times,
eliminate unnecessary duplication, and reduce costly and
time consuming errors. For more info, visit http://www.sections.asme.org/westernwa/training.asp.
The Bolted Joint Class
Spokane, WA
January 16-17
This two-day course provides an overview of
bolted joint fundamentals, including behavior, troubleshooting,
and various design approaches. For more info, visit http://www.sections.asme.org/westernwa/training.asp.
ASME North Puget Sound Section January
Meeting
January 17, Thursday
ASME North Puget Sound Section will hold a
Dinner Presentation on Thursday, 17 January, 2008 at 6 pm
with Dynamic Speaker Nikhil K. Rao on "Culture for
Innovation". Location: Paine Field Building C-80 at
the Everett Community College Aviation Maintenance Technology
School. Please RSVP by 16 January to Marcia Smith at 425-670-1939,
or aircraft.mechanic@verizon.net.
PSEC Engineering Exploration Night
at UW
January 29, Tuesday
The purpose of the Engineering Exploration
Night is to inform and excite students, mostly sophomores
or juniors, about careers in engineering, by giving them
an opportunity to meet and talk with practicing engineers.
If you’re interested in volunteering as a mentor,
please visit http://www.pseconline.org/Events/MentorNights/
for more info and sign-ups. Note that this is a one-night
activity (no long-term mentoring relationship required,
and that mentors will be asked to describe their experience
in the profession and answer questions posed by students.
February 2008
Dinner Meeting, February 6, Wednesday
The February 2008 Dinner Meeting will take
place on Wednesday, 6 February, at The Old Spaghetti Factory
in Seattle. The speaker will be Ron King, presenting on
the topic of engineered insulation materials, the forgotten
element in energy conservation.
Engineer’s Week 2008
February 18-22
Engineer’s week will be 18-22 February.
More info can be found at http://www.eweek.org. The February
newsletter will contain more information about local activities
during E-week.
50th Annual Puget Sound Engineering Council Awards
Banquet
The PSEC Banquet will take place 23 February
at Palisade in Magnolia. We would like to solicit nominations
for the PSEC Awards. The awards are listed below, and anyone
who is interested can read about past recipients at http://www.pseconline.org/Events/AwardsBanquet/.
Nominations are due 12 January, so there is still time to
put together strong nomination packets for these great honours.
WW Section members can email Kalan Guiley at guileyk@asme.org
with nomination proposals. Assistance in putting together
a nomination packet is available. The awards include:
o Young Engineer of the Year
o Academic Engineer of the Year
o Government Engineer of the Year
o Industry Engineer of the Year
o Professional Engineer of the Year
Pipe Stress Analysis Class in Calgary,
AB, Canada
February 20-22
The 2008 Pipe Stress Analysis Per ASME B31.3
Process Piping Code Seminar will feature Dr. Quy Truong,
ASME Fellow. For more info, visit http://www.sections.asme.org/westernwa/training.asp.
March 2008
Dinner Meeting
March, 11 Tuesday
March will have the Student Paper Competition,
where engineering students from local schools will compete,
with judgement rendered by the Members in attendance. Plan
to come and hear the future of our profession do their best.
More information will be in upcoming newsletters.
Giddens Industries Inc. Tour
A tour of Giddens Industries is in the works
for the last week of March, in partnership with the North
Puget Sound Section. Giddens Industries (www.giddens.com)
has been serving the aerospace industry since its inception
in 1974, with a manufacturing focus on large complex machined
and sheet metal parts.
Other News
New and Improved Western Washington
Section Website
The section website has gotten a facelift!
Check out the improvements at http://sections.asme.org/westernwa/.
2007 Member Survey: The Highlights
Thanks again to everyone who participated
in the 2007 Member Survey! Here is a quick summary of the
results:
Respondents ranked the following six topics
as most interesting: Machine Design (50%), Aerospace (50%),
Engineering and the Environment (43%), Manufacturing (35%),
Bioengineering/Medical Device Engineering (32%), and Engineering
Management (30%). The executive board is taking these interests
into account as we plan our 2008 programs. The Georgetown
Steam Plant Tour and the presentation “Insulation,
the Forgotten Technology for Energy Conservation”
have already been announced—keep your eyes peeled
for more exciting meetings and tours.
Respondents overwhelmingly selected tours
as their preferred activity (70%), followed by dinner meetings
(52%). Professional development courses came in as a distant
third (25%). As a result, the executive board will focus
on organizing tours, and we will likely forego some of our
dinner meetings in favour of tours. We are also investigating
the possibility of hosting a short course on lean manufacturing
in May. This will be the first such course we have hosted
in over a decade!
Among those who do not attend meetings, the
most popular reasons for not attending were scheduling conflicts
(40%) and inconvenient location (16%). To mitigate these
factors, the executive board will be working to diversify
the timing and the locations of our 2008 meetings. You may
notice that our January and February meetings are both scheduled
for Wednesdays (instead of the normal second Tuesday of
the month), and that the January meeting is in South Seattle
near Boeing Field.
Other changes that you can expect to see over
the next year include the following: transition to online
registration for activities (62.5% positive, 25% neutral);
elimination of all paper mailings (48% positive, 17% neutral);
some new venues for dinner meetings (36.5% positive, 55.5%
neutral). 91% of survey respondents were male, 79% were
over 40 years of age, and 30% were over 70. If you don’t
feel that the results of the survey match your perspectives,
or if you’d just like to help us get a more representative
sampling of the section membership, please keep an eye out
for the 2008 Member Survey, which will be sent out next
summer.
Online Job Board
Our online job board, with a listing of job
opportunities we’ve become aware of, is available
through the section website (http://sections.asme.org/westernwa/
). Section members who are aware of opportunities that should
be posted can forward them to Kalan Guiley, at guileyk@asme.org.
Section Officers
Chairman Kalan Guiley guileyk@asme.org
Treasurer Rachel Wittrock wittrockr2@asme.org
Secretary Frank Shih shihf@asme.org
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