Method notes2 min read
When the buyer asks an AI instead of a search engine
Industrial buyers are starting to ask assistants, not search boxes. What that changes for a supplier's website, what it does not, and what we did to ours.
Read the postNotes from an undercounted industry
Research, method notes and engineering notes from building Kabaido. Every figure carries its grade.
Inside the work3 min read
How to specify an industrial machine knife
A machine knife order is three dimensions, a steel, a hardness and an edge. Most enquiries carry four of the six. Here is the full specification.
Engineering notes3 min read
What a plasma cut chart actually encodes
A clean plasma part and an evening of grinding dross differ by three numbers per material and thickness. Where they come from and why they drift.
Engineering notes3 min read
What a balustrade quote has to calculate
A metre of balustrade looks like a price per metre. It is a structure with a load case, and the load case moves the price. The working, in order.
Method notes3 min read
Choosing a bandsaw blade in three questions
A bandsaw catalogue runs to hundreds of variants. The choice comes down to three questions and one rule about teeth. Here is the published maths.
Engineering notes4 min read
The soft jaw order hiding in a chuck model
A soft jaw enquiry looks like two words and a chuck size. The serration, the jaw envelope and the material are all implied. How a seller reads one.
Inside the work2 min read
What an RFQ actually contains
An RFQ looks like a document. It is closer to a scattered set of claims, each hiding somewhere else. How engineers read one, and how software should.
Industry research2 min read
You cannot hire your way out of a quoting backlog
The UK posts about 900 new application engineer adverts a month against a 27,200 base. What continuous re-hiring of a hard-to-define role really signals.
Method notes3 min read
How to measure a market nobody counts
No occupation code, no analyst report, no number to borrow. How we sized the UK application engineer market by triangulation, and kept it honest.
Industry research2 min read
Where £1.36bn of quoting capacity sits
UK application engineer pay barely varies by domain, so headcount is the whole map. Three domains hold 41.7% of it. A tour of a top-heavy market.
Inside the work2 min read
Five tasks gate every industrial order
An application engineer's week holds fifteen different jobs. Follow the orders instead of the diary and it collapses to five, all of them specification.
Industry research3 min read
The job title the labour market cannot see
Around 27,200 people in the UK do a job that official statistics cannot find. Here is what happens when a role spreads across sixteen occupation codes.
Engineering notes3 min read
Teaching software to read like a domain engineer
A general AI model knows what a milling cutter is. It does not know your milling cutter. What it takes to ground a model in a real industrial domain.
Engineering notes2 min read
Why quoting software should count in pence
Binary floating point cannot hold a tidy decimal exactly. Charming in a tutorial, less so on a 4,000-line quote. A short defence of integer money.
See the work these notes come from
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