I work for a conveyor installation/fabrication company. The fabrication end of our business has been steadily growing in the last 6-7 years as we are building bigger and more elaborate machines all of the time. We fabricate a wide variety of things, from simple brackets, to mezanines and equipment support structures, to conveyors of all types (tabletop, roller, slider bed, troughing, vibratory, trommels etc...), we modify lots of existing equipment, and we do a host of other odds and ends. There are view things that we won't try, due to the fact that I have a very ambitious boss, who is not afraid to try new things.
I was orignally hired on as a CAD jockey just out of college (I graduated with a BSME). The design here has always been based on a guess and check/it worked before philosophy with very little emphasis on calculations or theory. I have worked here for 18 months now, and I have taken on the brunt of the design work, since I am the only one with a technical background. I have learned a great deal, and have had a lot of success, with minimal guidance. Not having years of experience in the field, however, limits my ability to say "this has worked before" so I put a great deal of value on information that can be gathered from books. Right now my main sources of reference are my college text books and internet research. With the design philosophy that I described earlier, it is hard for me to justify spending $2000 on books. I am looking to aquire the bare bones of references, and then I can grow from there as needed. I need books focused on power transmission, structural design and weld design. I need something with a technical viewpoint with equations, charts and examples and less emphasis on theory.
Any help from the brilliant and experienced group here at Engineering Tips would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks