Hi Andrew,
Either you are the smartest of the bunch, or the only one that actually looked at the joint, either way you're the man.
Mark H,
I think your woodworking is engineering! and I'm an engineer!
Haha, I sub out the FEA's (Finite Element Analyses). I think of it as: I get paid the big bucks because I can problem solve, not because I can run a software program. A lot of jobs on the market for engineering specifically ask for FEA experience though. So maybe I'm not an engineer after all.
In the end, I think what makes me an engineer is the ability (hopefully) to take knowledge from a bunch of different sources (experience, journals, text books, experts, etc) and produce a solution. That's the engineering part, in my opinion. That solution process requires you to ask the right questions that others would not ask. Proving it out via math is a tool you use to get to the end result (and many times you have a software package). Understanding the theory is the hard part. A person who has had decades of experience building ships can probably tell you why you are having an XYZ problem without software. That decision is coming from lots of thoughts, not just experience. That same person may pass off the calculations to a more junior engineer because the senior already understands the processes, calculations, theories and doesn't really care about the tiny tweaks the 3D software may provide.
Maybe that makes me old school, but I'm with you Mark.
Cheers,
PS: Long into the future, I would like contract. If I'm charging $200 / hr, my answer can't be: "well, let me run the FEA to see what's going on" during an emergency shutdown and the customer is losing a ba-zillion dollars a day. So I think of it as, if you are a good engineer you can make dang good recommendations on what appears to be 'not enough' data. The cheaper engineers are the ones that can't perform during a shutdown due to the need to create a science project. In my industry anyway, I wouldn't pay anyone big contract money during a crisis to just tell me they need to run 5 days of calculations.
IMHO of course.