I saw this article in the NY Times this morning and the blood started boiling again, as I make my living solving heat transfer problems. The part that really got to me was this paragraph:
'Briggs & Stratton has another idea: another study. It is helping pay for a $650,000 safety review by a Swedish government institute at the behest of the relatively new nonprofit group, the International Consortium for Fire Safety, Health and the Environment.'
$650,000 to study small engine exhaust? I sure hope most of it is going toward emissions research and not fire risk because my company does that kind of study every week for around $5000 each! For less than that, we can design a 99.99% guaran#$%&*#&teed COMPACT heat shield using edge technology that will cost less than 50 cents to produce and install. And how much of our tax dollars is Bond wasting to support B&S's bad management?
Challenge to B&S: Stop complaining and spending everyone's money trying to weasel out of the inevitable. Instead, just let your younger engineers solve the problem of how to install the CC's for less than $20 each. Remember, cost is an engineering parameter - good engineering costs less.
Challenge to Bond: be a real statesman instead of yet another slimy enemy of our future generations and say goodby to B&S. Support small engine designers with good ol' American scrappy innovation and business savvy in actually COMPETING with B&S to produce much cleaner engines at lower prices without going to China (which any product designer knows is no longer profitable anyway, for the most part). I bet there's even 1 or 2 in Missoura.
I know none of them read this BLOG, but it feels good to say it anyway.
I don't know which is a bigger crime: tolerating bad air quality or supporting bad engineering which perpetuates a host of environmental problems.