This spring, I will have 43 years in as a design engineer. Over that time span, I have designed any number of weird, wacky, and wonderfull machines. Of course, the first 36 years, I worked for large engineering companies, and designed whatever product they were selling. The last seven years, I have been working from home as an independent consultant, and I am absolutely amazed at the range of different things that I get involved with. I work with a few inventors, and much of the developmental work that I help them with is proprietary, so I can't say too much about it. In the last 3 months, I have worked on manipulating devices to assist line workers at General Motors to lift heavy automotive parts into place on the assembly line, a machine that raises and lowers the lighting arrays on 100 foot tall lamp posts (like you see in the big chain store parking lots) so that the bulbs can be changed without renting a crane, a pair of machines for making jig saw puzzles, a spill proof watering dish for a dog,----and, the strangest one so far----I went to Oakville this week, and talked to a prospective customer about a cookie dough mixing machine. Damn, I never really thought much about cookies!!! I can remember my mom, rolling out the dough with a rolling pin, and cutting out cookies with an old tin can with one end removed.--But I'm talking about mass produced cookies---millions of cookies. Every grocery store that you go into across USA and Canada, and I suppose cities all over the world, there are always fresh cookies for sale. The dough is mixed in 1500 pound batch lots, dumped into a stainless steel hopper, and then goes thru a series of extruder rolls, shaping orifices, orbiting guillotine knives onto a conveyor and into an oven or off to be frozen and sold as "ready to cook" frozen cookie dough. A large industrial size cookie dough maker costs upwards of $250,000.00 and is all PLC controlled. Who'd a thunk it!!! The customer I spoke with wants me to design a "scaled down" cookie dough maker, and has a budget of $100,000.00 to spend. No wonder I still work every day. This stuff is too much fun to stop!!! ---Brian