few years back I had a typical setout job.
A vegetable grower had been somewhere and seen a very large manicured lawn with a sprinkler system where all the sprinklers were lined up neatly in rows from several directions.
He decided he'd like that for his market garden.
This is the site
Enter me into the affray.
It was mid summer, temperatures hot, for me. Nights cool at 6-8å¡, daytime quickly around 25å¡ - celcius.
I was to establish a grid that served the best layout and gave the desired effect, with allowance for rows suited to their cropping machinery.
All easy stuff.
I established a base and gave them lengths between sprinklers.
It was about 100mmÌ÷ PVC pipe with a tee every 14 metres from memory.
I had a frantic call early one morning to say nothing lined up.
I knew I hadn't made different measurements on successive rows and checked some pipe they had laying on the ground ready to put in the trench.
The lengths were 200-250mm different to what I had setout.
No one had accounted for the marked difference between daytime and evening/ early morning temperatures and the longer it lay on the ground the longer the pipe got.
Then there was a query as to my general setout and whether it would fit their machinery.
I suggested they ignore all fancy setout and drive their gear to check for fit.
I was somewhat amused when the gear arrived and the driver queried my measurements.
This is the measuring device he used to make the comparisons. There's a GPS fitted to the tractor.
Following are some photos of progress along the way
It was an interesting job that was somewhat overkilled with science.
I suggested they cut a template pipe the desired length, allowing for fittings and just use that.
It worked well and that was the end of my involvement.
I don't think the desired outcome was entirely met, but the end result looked good.
The project certainly had its challenges as the setout was given in the trench and the standups had to be vertical whilst they back-filled about 600mm, and keeping on line. No mean feat. Then there's that sun effect.
Interestingly whilst I was doing my initial RTK pickup for design something hijacked my signal and things went haywire for a while. I gathered another radio was transmitting close by with same frequency.
All the setout was done with Total Station so that wasn't an issue then.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
Working in the real world is so much more challenging than simply following the gross assumptions built into standard computer software.
There is a very old story of a newly-introduced hay mower of the sickle bar variety that would have a major failure after a small number of hours of working in standard field conditions. The design team had been led by a mechanical engineer who had no concept of the physical properties of the material to be cut by the mower. One must understand the properties of the materials before attempting to finalize a design to conquer them.
About 110 years ago a new branch of engineering was developed to address this sort of problem. Agricultural Engineering added biological and agronomic study into the standard courses focused on physics and chemistry. Nearly all ag engineering students were farm raised with working knowledge of the day to day realities of problem solution skills. Their hands-on experiences from childhood of working with the food and fiber involved in agriculture meshed with their training in the standard fields of mechanical and civil engineering to produce graduates with the practical knowledge to supplement their classroom training. As rural electrification became available, they were able to take the lead in developing the tools to ease the farmer's daily work. For example, moving all of the harvested grain repeatedly with a shovel is hard work. Introducing the concept of moving grain and feed with a screw conveyor type auger was a fantastic improvement. But, you couldn't have a different design for each grain, i.e. corn, wheat, oats, milo, barley, soybeans. The farmer needed something that would work reasonably well for all potential uses. Solving that problem involved first learning all of the physical properties of those crops. Today those challenges have been expanded into much more challenging areas. Imagine a machine that can assess the readiness for harvest of a food item (apple, cabbage, asparagus spear) in a fraction of an instant to energize, or not, the harvesting mechanism to remove that item and transport it to a temporary storage unit (bin/pallet/bale) while leaving all other such items undisturbed until some later pass determines they are fit for harvest while the harvesting unit is moving through the items at the greatest possible speed over less than smooth terrain.
Holy Cow, post: 415875, member: 50 wrote: ....Imagine a machine that can assess the readiness for harvest of a food item (apple, cabbage, asparagus spear) in a fraction of an instant to energize, or not, the harvesting mechanism to remove that item and transport it to a temporary storage unit (bin/pallet/bale) while leaving all other such items undisturbed until some later pass determines they are fit for harvest while the harvesting unit is moving through the items at the greatest possible speed over less than smooth terrain.
Pretty amazing what manufacturing (mech. eng.) can do nowadays. I was watching some mindless tv at 3am the other morning and saw a machine that was dumping like 50 bushels of peanuts a minute over a 5' wide cascade and under the watchful eye of a computerized air gun. Any peanut that was discolored or otherwise singled out was "shot" into the trash bin by a millisecond of a blast of very precisely aimed compressed air. That thing didn't miss. Scary.
Wait 'til the military gets a hold of something like that....
