Del

About MeHello. My name is Del.

I am a bit of an intravert, so it is not my nature to participate in such a public forum, but the "MySpace"phenomenon has swept through my household and I didn't want to bethe odd man out.
By way of a quick bio, I am a MechanicalEngineer and a computer guy by training, and I work for IBM. I have been married to my lovely wife, Jan, for 32 years.My earliest recollection of Jan was when she played an angel in thechurch Christmas play at nine and a half years of age. She was adoll!

We have four handsome/lovely children, Jeremy, Bethany, Joel,and Nathan. Nathan and Joel were born in Lexington, KY.Bethany was born in Lower Bucks County, PA. Jeremy was born at ourcurrent location in Charlotte, NC.
Due to the abysmal state ofthe public schools here in Charlotte, my children received most oftheir education at Teel Academy, our NC-registered home school.And if I may say so, all four of them are sharp as a tack!
For those with an obsession for more detail, I have providedaddtional information below. I previously provided this boringinformation for the users of a website and game-server I have beenoperating for my children for a number of years,http://fragglerock.teelplanet.com , where the troops know meas Mr FraggleRock. My users often asked about me, so I wrote upthis history. Since many of my Fraggles are grinding their waythrough school, this history emphasizes my education process andsubsequent work assignments.
1 Growin' Up
1.1 My Parents
My dad fought in four major campaigns in World War 2. He fought in North Africa, in Italy, and in France. He was an anti-aircraft gunner in the Army. He left the Army after the war and got married.Jobs were hard to find so he enlisted in the Air Force a few yearsafter the war ended.
My mom is the daughter of a pioneer preacher. Grandpa built Assembly of God churches all over Southeast Missouri. He would move his family into a community that did not have a church, built the church (himself), and then a parsonage, and get a church congregation established. Then a permanent minister would be introduced and Grandpa would move on to repeat the process in another town. He was an awesome man of integrity and faith. 1.2 Home
I was born on Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. When I was around six months old, my dad left the Air Force and my family moved to southwest St. Louis County, Missouri. My dad hired on at McDonnell Aircraft and worked in the receiving department. My mom and dad both grew up in Southeast Missouri and had several relatives, including their parents, there. 1.3 School
I received a public education in the Rockwood school district and graduated when I was seventeen, in the top one percent of my class. I received academic scholarships and decided to co-op to raise additional money for college. I alternated semesters between work and school, raising funds for college room and board by working at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft. I enrolled in the University of Missouri at Rolla (the historic Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy). The school taught over forty engineering disciplines and had its own nuclear reactor. There were forty guys to each gal on this hardcore engineering campus. I was not allowed to have a car while at school. I rented a room in a boarding house about three blocks from campus. After four and a half years of college, I graduated Magna cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. 2 Co-op Experience at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft
McDonnell Douglas Aircraft is a top-notch aerospace engineering and manufacturing facility in St. Louis, Missouri. America_s first space capsules, the Mercury and Gemini capsules, were designed and manufactured there. The awesome F-4 Phantom of Vietnam fame and the F-15 Superiority Fighter were designed and manufactured there. The incredible F-18 Hornet seen launching from carriers is designed and manufactured there. A few years ago, the Boeing Corporation bought McDonnell Douglas-to keep the French from nabbing it. While I was going through college, I paid my way by enrolling in a cooperative-education program. This permitted me to use my engineering training on the job while raising the funds required for the subsequent semester. The only work I did while attending classes was a teaching assistantship during my Senior year. 2.1 Harpoon Anti-Ship Missile

During my first co-op session at McDonnell Douglas, I worked with the team developing the Harpoon Anti-ship Missile. This cruise missile can be launched from the wing of an airplane, from the deck of a ship or from a submarine. For sub or ship launch, a solid propellant booster is used to get the missile up to flight velocity. When flight velocity is reached, the disposable jet engine is started and propels the missile to its destination. The design team was analyzing jet engines from two different vendors when I joined them. I spent a great deal of that first term helping them analyze a massive amount of wind tunnel test data and engine performance data. 2.2 F-15 Strength

I had the privilege of joining the F-15 strength group just as Ship Number One was coming off of the assembly line in 1972. I worked in the center fuselage group, creating computer models of the airframe and analyzing them for their structural integrity under flight conditions. I walked around on top of the very first F-15, and poked around inside the landing bay, comparing the actual structure to the stack of drawings I was using for my analysis. I remember the day we hosted half of Congress and much of the Air Force top brass-the F-15 Rollout Ceremony. The plane was painted air-superiority blue. It looked awesome.
A few days after the rollout ceremony, the wings were popped off of this F-15, and it was pulled into a monster C-5 cargo jet and flown to Edwards Air Force base for its flight testing.
That was a great co-op session. One day the US Secretary of Defense walked past my desk. On another day, three Apollo astronauts walked by. One of the McDonnell brothers worked on the floor there. I occasionally wandered over to his desk, where he was working on the shoulder mounting of a 30mm cannon for the F-15. 2.3 Wind Tunnel
Another truly amazing assignment, the wind tunnel, presented an incredible view of the dynamics of flight. This building could be described as a race track for air-since it was a closed loop with a huge fan to create airflow. By looping the airflow back to the fan after it flowed through the test section, its momentum could be harnessed. This enabled the existing fan to create greater velocities in the test section. We placed very expensive scale models of F-15 wings into the airflow and studied their modes of oscillation (bending and torsion). Whenever two of the six modes of oscillation started matching frequencies, destructive resonance would occur. At resonance, energy would be pumped into the structure creating flutter. We would hit the kill switch on the fan to stop the run, but it was often too late, and I would have to run down the tunnel and pick pieces out of the safety grating. 2.4 Staff Engineering
The Staff Engineering team was a group of hotshots who received all sorts of special assignments. My supervisor was a pyrotechnics expert. He was constantly receiving calls from St. Louis authorities requesting guidance regarding bomb threats, etc. I spent some of that term working on an engine flameout problem the Air Force F-5 fighter was having (not the F-15).
I also worked on a computer program that had been written to assist in modeling hydraulic systems-pressure drops, fluid velocities, etc. I was given the assignment to extend the program to support compressible fluids (air). This meant that I had to model the effects of sonic velocities-where a standing Mach 1 shock wave would collapse the pressure profile. That was a challenging assignment, but I completed it successfully. 2.5 Structural Testing
The Air Force had a special project to study the feasibility of constructing the F-15 wing torque box-the main load bearing structure of an F-15 wing, out of boron-graphite epoxy composite material. If the torque box could be made out of composite material, hundreds of pounds could be shaved off of the airframe weight. By knowing the air pressure distribution was across the surface of the wing at a given airspeed, say Mach 2 (2 times the speed of sound), flight conditions could be mechanically simulated. A series of 5 inch by 5 inch rubber panels were glued all over the wing surface. By linking these panels properly, the network of links could come together like an upside-down tree, and pulled at one point, creating a pressure distribution like that experienced in flight. This collection of links is known as a whiffletree.
I was given the task of simulating a steady state Mach 2 push over and a steady state Mach 2 pull up with my whiffletree. I designed a 2-ton whiffletree that came together at one point and was connected to a 100,000 pound load cell. We cycled the full scale F-15 test wing through thousands of cycles to confirm its fatigue strength. This pulled the wing tip through a 36 inch arc. Then the wing was pulled to failure to determine its ultimate strength. 2.6 Advanced Environmental Control
I had the privilege of working with the man who had been the head of the McDonnell Douglas plasma physics lab for 15 years. We had a bid from the Air Force to create an advanced environmental control system for the F-15. It was an exotic design and it was fascinating to work through the physics and thermodynamics to characterize the performance of this design. We won the bid. 3 IBM
3.1 Product Development
I joined IBM in Lexington, Kentucky in 1974 as a Junior Engineer in Advanced Product Development. I went from Junior Engineer to Associate Engineer to Senior Associate Engineer to Staff Engineer in about three years. I became an IBM manager at age 26 and managed teams in both product development and manufacturing engineering. I completed 30 hours of graduate work at the University of Kentucky while working in the Lexington lab. 3.2 Manufacturing Engineering, etc
I moved from the Lexington lab to IBM Biomedical Systems in Princeton, NJ in 1981 to become the Manufacturing Engineering Manager for IBM_s Blood Products. We made some incredible blood washing and blood cell separating machines. After a very rewarding five and a half years in management, I returned to the technical side of the house. I have held positions as an advisory engineer, a senior business and technical analyst, and I am currently classified as an Information Technology Architect. 3.3 Assignments
I have written programs supporting computer numerical control and lashed up CNC equipment in support of machine tool automation. I have worked in a CD manufacturing line, with laser beam recorders, injection mold equipment, silk-screening, and packaging automation. I have worked in a software development team where I was responsible for the installation of a software program onto four different unix server operating systems, and six different client platforms, in eight different languages. I had to create both DB2 and Oracle databases as a part of the installation. I am presently a part of a team which brings computer aided design software into the business and releases it into the IBM systems for worldwide sales and distribution. Most of my department resides in Poughkeepsie, New York. I work out of my home office in Charlotte, North Carolina.