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Design engineer says machinery production has changed

A retired machinery engineer says they really don’t build things like they used to, because of modern technology and manufacturing capabilities.

Dave Kling was a machinery engineer for Gehl Equipment, designing harvesters, specialty attachments, and round bailers in the 1970s.  He tells Brownfield back then, the manufacturing process required more simple designs. “No special stamping dies, nothing like that.  You basically made things very simple.  Squares, rectangles, simple bends.  Now, you see a lot of laser-cut parts.”

Kling says things commonly found in machinery today were not always easy to bring to new products. “I came up with a concept that required a hydraulic cylinder and got resistance from the management because not all tractors had two sets of hydraulics at that time, but (John) Deere was doing it already and that kind of gave me a license to go forward with my design.”

And, he says the electronics were very basic back then. “We did get the advent of linear actuators which worked great for shifting gearboxes.  We tried them in some applications where hydraulics had been there and found out that even though they had the force to do it, they didn’t have the durability.”

Kling today’s sophisticated farm machinery means there are unlimited career opportunities to keep everything running right. From Wisconsin Farm Technology Days