UKH

CAD Designer / Engineer The Opportunity Rockcity Climbing Holds have an exciting opportunity for an eager 3D CAD Designer / Engineer, to help...

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In reply to UKC Gear:

Just comment as I wouldn't be able to apply as you're in Hull. But what you asking for is really inconsistent. You mention a 3d CAD package but then talk about AutoCAD which is mainly 2d, Draftsight which is 2d and Sketchup which is not a serious CAD package. You also mention CAM and CNC knowledge is desirable, and an experienced CNC operator. Plus good knowledge of fluid dynamics and mechanics - what you're asking for is really pretty high level, and the salary you are offering is crazy low. An experienced 3d CAD designer should be on 35-40k PLUS benefits, not 20k. 20k is college leaver level, and they are extremely unlikely to have the knowledge you are asking for, especially the experienced CNC operator bit as its not usual to have done both. I know the climbing industry is not exactly flush with dough, but you do get the candidate you pay for... 

In reply to UKC Gear:

I'm afraid the salary is far too low. For the skills and responsibilities you've outlined you need to be paying £35k at the absolute minimum. You are asking for quite a wide set of skills which leaves a small pool of potential applicants and at the moment, demand for engineers is very high. Remote working opportunities also means you're competing with employers across the country now, not just locally. 

In reply to UKC Gear:

I would have potentially applied for this but also would be looking £35-40k. Quite frankly £20k is almost an insult to the profession

In reply to beardy mike:

To put it in perspective, 22.5k is the average UK salary for a cleaner.

https://www.reed.co.uk/average-salary/average-domestic-cleaner-salary

In reply to beardy mike:

I started working as an engineer in the late 90's on £20k! Graduates are getting mid to high 20s these days and they're certainly not expected to had 3d CAD or CAM/CNC skills

In reply to UKC Gear:

As above, Rockcity are taking the mick, they are looking for someone with a broader spread of experience than you would pick up on most grad schemes for less than people were paying for engineers straight out of grad schemes, (32k per annum in Derby was considered low around 5 years ago).

I would be surprised if they have any provision for mentoring as well so early careers staff could forget about chartership even if they were willing to accept the clown car salary. 

In reply to spenser:

I don't really want to get into whether they are taking the mick or not, but I wanted to point out firstly the inconsistency in what they are asking for, on the one hand really basic and on the other hand really quite advanced, and also that I think that they have somewhere between Bob Hope and no hope of finding someone at the level of pay they are advertising at, especially if they are hoping that that person will not get the hump and leave in no time at all. I get that the climbing industry is a lifestyle industry to be in, but if you want to retain high quality staff you can't offer them a salary so low that it's not even worth the years worth of training required to complete the job. Not just that, job interviews and invitations to apply should be seen as an opportunity for the candidate to consider the company and what they would offer them. This advert basically reads like they fundamentally don't understand what they are asking for, undervalue the position they are offering and the amount of expertise they require. It's not a great read to me. Right now (for a change) engineers are in demand...

In reply to beardy mike:

We always have been in demand but they're finally getting desperate to actually pay us.

In reply to beardy mike:

A CNC operator in Germany is on an average of €34,000, a good one €40 grand upwards. Thats just to operate the thing, not do the design.

The guys that do the CAD work and operate the machine I know get the good side of 50 grand. A tractor driver around my way is on €30,000 ++ if you can find one.

In reply to jimtitt:

I know, although to be fair German engineering wages are across the board much higher than in the UK. I have worked with a few companies over there and it works in my favour that that is the case. But your point stands... I'd say realistically for both, here you should be looking at the upper end of the scale at something like 35-45k plus benefits... 

In reply to beardy mike:

I've just written a job ad incredibly similar to this one. We're competing for these very same candidates and struggling to fill our positions. They'd be in a salary band that runs from 35-55 ish. A fresh green grad would be at the bottom end of that. A few years experience (ideally with industry cad software, not the hobbyist stuff listed, but we'd consider most teachable applicants tbh) would land them in the middle. Oh and Flexi time and generous pension contribs and training and development and loads of other big PLC benefits....

In reply to beardy mike:

They don't mention if it's 100% remote or onsite a certain proportion or in their office all the time or what. A job advert that doesn't mention where you need to be, all a bit weird! 

In reply to UKC Gear:

Hi everyone and thanks for the comments.  This job advertisement wasn't supposed to insult all the CAD designers on UKC.  It is pretty clear from the job advertisement that there is more than £20k and more than the £30K on offer for the right skill set.  We wanted to cast as wide a net as possible, so as not to exclude anyone with talent interested in this sector.  The assumption that only a graduate or someone with current experience would apply is incorrect.  This job offer is open to anyone, including self taught without any work experience hence the wide range of salary option.  That said £30K is then above the average CAD designer in Germany (at €34K) so where we wrote '£30,000 or more' would allow something to be negotiated with a candidate reflecting the experience, something we are still understanding.  Employers will often will use evidence of payslips to set a rate of pay that is satisfactory to all.

Our application of CAD is fairly new, climbing hold manufacturers currently are not part of this industry, so we will make mistakes in some aspects of trying to use new technologies as we cross over several sectors.  it was expected that those who had the skills would also be able to guide us through this industry.  Hopefully those who can see this will know what we are asking for and then offering.  It's a shame some didnt see this as an opportunity to have a conversation.  Fortunately we have had some applications and so these conversations now start.  There is obviously a lot of flexibility in where the work will occur too.  

To be clear, we aren't asking for a CNC Operator.  We know this is a separate and higher paid position, we will of course consider all the input when we do buy a CNC machine and look for an experienced operator to pick up the slack in our understanding.

As novices we have no idea how CAD and CNC work together, which is why anyone with this understanding would be a great asset.

Anyway, we are sure we all have work to be getting on with, thanks!

In reply to Rockcity Climbing Holds:

Hi Rockcity, my intention was really NOT to haul you over the coals or anything like that. I've worked in the outdoor industry for years and it is not an easy marketplace to be in. I was mainly surprised by the advert seeming to not really know what you wanted, but of course if this is the first time you are approaching it in this way, then that is totally understandable, and if I'm honest that was what I thought it might be down to. 

The average wage according to Reeds for a design engineer is between 38k and 54k. 30k as I've stated before, is massively too low. You've stated that your aim is to open it to as many people as possible, but you will immediately alienate anybody from a qualified background by posting a figure as low as you have. You have stated you are just starting out and will need help to negotiate the quagmire of technology - someone who is having a cracking at it, will unless they are lucky, not manage to fall into the many and costly traps which await. Its really important IMO to get product design right in as efficient a manner as possible, because design iterations are darned expensive. Do yourself a favour and get the most experienced person you can, it will pay back with dividends. If you want a chat, PM me and I would be happy to do so at no charge just to see if there is any way I can help you get started on the right foot. I've been through the CNC pain, and CAD, FMEA, product cycle etc many times.

In reply to beardy mike:

Just to satisfy my own curiosity, where do you think CAD would fit in to the hold design process? I have experience modelling civil engineering projects in Autocad and rendering in 3DSmax, I can’t really imagine using Autocad to sculpt a hold shape from a blank screen. Would the shape still get physically sculpted in foam, scanned in, then tidied up in Autocad, adding bolt screw holes, etc. before exporting a file to the CNC machine?

While fine for the stuff I do, Autocad doesn’t seem much good at modelling free-form shapes. Even the sculpting tools in 3DSmax seem more powerful than Autocad. What, these days, is the the go to software for modelling things like holds? I hear “Inventor” being mentioned however maybe this is just what’s being taught in schools.

In reply to JLS:

Things like Blender are widely used in the 3D printing community and I think the workflow would work well for some of the climbing hold geometry which I have seen. You can make most geometry in most packages, it just depends how much frustration is acceptable in completing the task, I am most confident with NX but it would feel the wrong tool for the job. 

In reply to JLS:

Well you could quite happily use it to prototype and mould make. Combined with a large format extrusion printer you could print volumes which you could then finish and paint with grip paint to make a prototype to try out, rather than hand shaping. This could then be iterated if it was incorrect, replicated quickly, etc. Cnc could be used for foam cuts for moulds, for cores to be covered with a resin matrix, or used to cut wooden holds. Or indeed to cut and prep ply for volumes. 

AutoCAD I would say is the wrong tool for the job. Admittedly it's a long time since I last used it, especially for 3d CAD, but it was always very clunky. For shapes like holds really you want to be surface modelling the outer skin, then thickening that surface to produce a solid volume and then creating prismatic features inside the shape to create structure for strength and mounting. You will want a mixture of reasonable to good surfacing capability Mixed with fairly basic solid modelling capabilites, both in terms of the CAD and the candidate. Surfacing isn't THAT hard, but it's harder than solids as you need to create a mesh of 3d lines to use as location for your surface. Any of the parametric industry standard cad programmes will do what you need them to, but some will be slower and more laborious in that sense. Personally I use an ld seat of Solidworks, it has reasonable surfacing, although not best in class. From what I hear, RhinoCAD is better for surfacing, but weaker for solids, so you have to balance up what you're trying to do. I mean if you had a spare 30k you could go CATIA but you would be mental to do so. For what it's worth I think you could most likely do what you need to do in Solidworks with a reasonably skilled operator. I mean if I can create a biner with surfaces in SW, then a hold shouldn't be too hard...

In terms of how that translates to rapid prototyping or cnc, well rapid ptyping usually relies on a manufacturer supplied software to translate a stl dataset of the part into something printable. Accuracy is determined by the density of nodes produced when writing the STL from your master CSD dataset. It's a relatively easy process.

CNC is NOT easy. CNCs for the most part run on lines of G-Code, which either needs a highly trained programmer with years of training and machining behind them, or it needs a slightly less skilled operator and a piece of CAM software to write the g-code. In the case of surfacing, you would 100% need CAM software because CNC machines on deal in straight lines. To achieve a smooth finish you need very very short lines, with every line representing a line of gcode, I.e. a large part will require thousands, of not hundreds of thousands of lines of code. If you have a good machine, have good experiencing of tool feeds and speeds, and know what you're doing, using CAM is pretty easy, if you have a good package. There are a few bad pieces of software out there. Personally I'd say of you are less experienced, having something which is directly plugged into the CAD software is the best way to go, and I mean directly integrated, not just a link system as they are pretty naff. When I did my machining I blew 5k on buying a CAM package which was a bag of spanners and wasted a month of my life. It produced literally nothing in that month. After that I rented a seat of HSMWorks and I was cutting in a weekend.

Where I think CAD makes even more sense is ply volumes and whole wall design. Being able to accurately design panels from surface designs, and then transferring that to a ply  2d router to cut the panels has got to be where its at. In addition you can quickly create a supporting structure from a wire frame and then assign timer or steel sizes to those wire frames to create fully parametric designs which can be detailed quickly and easily. 

In reply to beardy mike:

Cheers.

In reply to UKC Gear:

I can do all of that for you and more, but you’ll have to pay £50K plus! I was earning what you are offering 15 years ago!

take a look at the genera jobs market and you’ll see what industry is paying right now.