Any freelance Professional Engineers here?

[Shake me up Judy]

The initial message was deleted from this topic on 11 June 2012 at 20:56

[tvrgit]

What kind of engineering? Civil / mechanical / electrical / structural or what?

[wedg1e]

Hmmm. I design and build machines to irradiate rodents for cancer research: none have ever cost anything like £250K though.

Maybe we need to amend our pricing structure

[wedg1e]

Shake me up Judy said:

The larger contracts are usually for large scale automated storage systems with associated sample preparation, liquid handling etc. Think 10M individually coded samples stored at -20 or -80degC each of which can be individually robotically accessed in less than a minute. Alteratively we have recently developed a protein factory that fully automates the culturing of ~1200 cell lines, determining the growth rate of each in real time and harvesting purified protein from the cells when they acheive a certain density, it's large scale expensive kit! >> Edited by Shake me up Judy on Tuesday 3rd January 22:45

'Nuff respec'!

You lost me after "etc." ...

Guess I'll stick to me Cobalt-60... [glowslikerafdug] <<in-joke on PH, sorry

[Shake me up Judy]

Seen the pictures - know exactly what you mean!

Cobalt 60 sounds like tricky stuff to handle do you buy it as sealed sources or package it yourselves?

[Pickled Piper]

Yep, I'm a degreed Mechanical Engineer that freelances in the Automotive Sector. There is little demand for one man consultancies in my sector.I think it is a question of terminology rather than anything else. Customers are very unlikely to turn over a large project in it's entirety to an unknown entity, it's just too high risk. However, they are willing to buy in expertise to help them out and they often want this expertise based on site.

I have ex colleagues that have set up "Consultancies". In reality other than the fancy name and the associated overheads of keeping an office and a number of employees, they are really just providing manpower.

The "contract" vacancies that you see advertised through agencies are the bottom end of the scale. The best "jobs", as in any sector, never get advertised and you will get to know of them through your contacts.

That's all I can think of for the moment. My advice would be to speak with someone who has done this in your sector.

pp

[Shake me up Judy]

Thanks PP. Good advice. How did you get started?