iCrank Blog

Trade magazines are a great way to keep current with trends in your field, software advancements and other technology information. We have a page set up to help you subscribe to the ones you already know about, as well discover some new ones you may not have seen. The page is located at:

iCrank Free Trade Magazines

The obvious favorites are listed (Machine Design, Design News, etc.) as well as some really good…

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We stumbled upon a great website for your kids called Howtoons that may help pull them away from the video games and get them excited about building things (and possibly learning something in the process). There are some very good projects that are presented in a comic strip format and involve some basic science and engineering principles. From their own description, the projects:

“Utilize inexpensive, kid–friendly materials, and prove that the world at large is infinitely more exciting than anything happening on the TV or computer screen. Plus, each project will provide readers with practical skills and problem solving…

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If you have a P.E., you need to keep it maintained with professional development hours. These can sometimes be a pain to obtain. There is a website, PDHengineer.com, that now provides online courses that are eligible for development hours. There are a number of course categories … Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever produce 3D rendered images of your designs for presentations (or the marketing department), you know it is sometimes difficult to quickly get the image you want. We have bumped into this new rendering software Hypershot by Bunkspeed. There is a free trial version that we installed and tested. It works quite well. You can easily assign materials … Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a book? We’ve assembled a collection of what we think are the most needed books for a Mechanical Engineer. Check out our selections at this link: iCrank Engineering Library

You can buy these books through association with amazon, so you can use your existing amazon account. Browsing through our selection might lead you… Read the rest of this entry »

Need a break? Here is a great site produced by the University of Houston that is a collection of articles by Dr. John H. Lienhard. There are over 2000 of them on the history of various machines and the people that invented them. They are short and entertaining. We have created a shortcut link that you can click to quickly get a random article. Try it here: Random Engines Article.

There are a number of other features… Read the rest of this entry »

One of our more dreaded tasks…patent searches. Has anyone ever used the USPTO site? - very painful. Lately we have been using the freepatentsonline.com site instead. While it is much better, we think there is finally an even better alternative - Google Patent Search. Google has leveraged their search technology… Read the rest of this entry »

How many times have had to send someone a really large file? Your company’s email server chokes on it, so you can’t simply email it. There are a large number of free (and not free) services that will handle this for you. We’ve tried many, our favorite is sendspace. We typically use this service for such things as… Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever been at a loss when trying to explain to your children what engineering is all about (much less other non-tech adults). Or have have you ever wanted to give a 30 minute presentation about engineering at your child’s school? (been there - done that). We have found a great resource - “The Futures Channel” at thefutureschannel.com. They have a great… Read the rest of this entry »

We have always been amazed at how difficult it can be to get a small quantity of several different standard sizes of orings for prototype assemblies. It usually involves several phone calls and/or emails to get through the process. Well we have finally found a website that we now use for our orings: Marco Rubber - www.marcorubber.com.

The site has an online ordering system… Read the rest of this entry »