"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
m...

Jim Wilkins wrote:

The trouble with Chevy is they would order the tooling and test
station for that carb well in advance and then keep calling with
"Oh,
by the way..." changes as they refined it.

We larded the test station for their 1970's analog ABS controller
with
jumpers so they could change the test parameters themselves. While
I
enjoyed flying first-class I didn't at all like Flint MI. For some
reason there weren't many passengers on those flights.

GM's project engineer was a Ph.D. from India with absolutely no
practical hands-on experience. He wanted the ramp-down curve of
wheel
sensor speed accurate to 8 decimal places because that's what his
calculator gave him. No one had taught him that resistors have
tolerances.


Today, .01% are easy to get.

They were back then too. A company half an hour away would grind the
Ruthenium oxide blanks to whatever precision we could afford. IIRC the
non-standard ones for op-amp production line testers cost about $5
apiece.

Another company on the way to work made me a batch of custom
thick-film resistors to match a laser diode to the 50 Ohm drive line
at up to 6 GHz. I don't remember how much the Air Force paid for them.