How does one become Tony Stark? (the Engineer, not the Iron Man)

May 26, 2013 5:30 PM

If you were starting with no applicable background, no engineering degree, nothing except for a lot of free time and a moderate amount of money to spend, how would you become Tony Stark? No limits on time, whether it's 6 months or 60 years, how would you go from Joe the VCR clock programmer to Tony the Engineer?

I'd like to learn how to make things. If you were a young, impressionable, pre-Iron Man Tony Stark, where would you begin? I know this is an ambiguous question, but think along the lines of: "First I'd get my hands on a primer to mechanical engineering. Then I'd get my hands dirty with a 3D printer and an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Read these books." but in more detail. Specific books, technologies, anything to fulfill the goals of this though experiment are welcome. Software, hardware, whatever. I'm not looking for information on how to make anything in particular, I'd like to set the foundation to make anything. (or at least attempt to)

Obviously we all know that being an engineer/maker/inventor isn't just sitting around and creating robots or faster than light warp drives, I'm using Tony Stark to illustrate an ideal. I know it's very hard. But I'm curious as to what steps you guys would take to get from point A to point B. Point B being the point where one could think "I want to turn my house into a smart-house over the next year with a central Linux server and some off the shelf sensors in my spare time" and get it done, or you know what, maybe even the point where you think "I want to build a robot or a faster than light warp drive." Sky's the limit. What is the recipe to make the ultimate Maker?

posted by walka to Technology (19 answers total)

Own a junkyard? That's how the bear suit guy rolls [Project Grizzly].
posted by oceanjesse at 6:19 PM on May 26, 2013

Hang out around a number of different people who can each make some subset of anything. Offer to help with anything they may need help with, including the very dull things. Be reliable and trustworthy. Observe how they do things and think about things.

Meanwhile, in your spare time, start with calculus, then on to basic physics, statics, programming, and chemistry. Those will be a good foundation for many other things. Skip the "primer" that assumes you don't know calculus or statics.
posted by yohko at 6:30 PM on May 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't know if you are being facetious with your use of Tony Stark as an ideal, but you might as well be asking something along the lines of "I don't exercise much, I sit in front of the tv a lot, get winded checking the mailbox, but I want to make it to the olympics someday and maybe get a gold. What do I need to do to get there?".

Really if you want to be one of the world's top engineers/inventors/designers, talent and drive are probably the best things you can have. But this applies to any field if you want to be the best.

Now if you are asking how can you actually get to the point of inventing/building something you can go many routes. Easiest most direct is to hit college and get an engineering degree. There are some people who are just so genius that college is a hindrance (e.g. Bill Gates, Dean Kamen). If you just want to be a tinkerer, then just start playing. Learn programming, take things apart and put back together, play with Arduino, build something.
posted by aarondesk at 6:33 PM on May 26, 2013 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The most Tony Stark-like achievement I've ever heard of was by Dave Gingery, who built a machine-tooling shop, more or less from scratch, from scrap metal. There's a book series on how to replicate his achievement - I imagine following that would teach you a lot, although that is much more in the Tony Stark in the Cave mould, not the huge R&D lab Tony Stark.

For the higher tech stuff:
MIT Opencourseware Materials Science.

There's lots of other stuff on that site I'm not going to link to, because the very first step in becoming Tony Stark is, really, teaching yourself to teach yourself…he's a crazy, driven, obsessive autodidact.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 6:34 PM on May 26, 2013

Response by poster: @aarondesk, the Tony Stark ideal is definitely facetious. It's less "Tell me how to become an Olympic Weightlifter, because that's what I actually want to do and I think it's possible" and more "I think it would be interesting to learn how to make things. For fun, let's use Tony Stark as an extreme example, how would one go about becoming like him?" I chose to structure the question in that way in hopes of getting more creative and open-ended answers. More a thought experiment than a "please help me I need to get this done."
posted by walka at 6:59 PM on May 26, 2013

Best answer: Spend your working part of the day split into fourths:
1. Reading primary material (well, start with textbooks, but get into papers and data quickly) and engaging it as much as possible. Absolutely no summary Internet articles; you don't have time for them. If you find yourself talking out loud at books while reading them, you're probably on the right track.

2. Building things as quickly as possible. Don't wait until you know enough. You should be failing all the time because you're hitting your knowledge limits and the limits of the tech and materials you're using.

3. Engaging other inventors, engineers and builders. You'll want to be the most intense, inquisitive person in the room; at the same time, you definitely do not want to come in with any preconceived opinions about how things work until you are absolutely certain (comes from #1 and #2.)

4. Play. Interact with the world in as many fun ways as possible. It's enjoyable, gives your brain a break and also gives you time to chew over problems subconsciously which is vital to learning new things.
posted by michaelh at 7:06 PM on May 26, 2013 [8 favorites]

Some of the answers in this thread (different role model, same general idea) may be helpful.
posted by capricorn at 7:25 PM on May 26, 2013

I think you may come to regret your Tony Stark metaphor, as it's the equivalent of asking "How do I become a dragon?" Dude doesn't exist, he's a character, and dudes like him don't exist, the technology doesn't exist, the money to build it doesn't it exist.

I think you need to scale down your ambitions one more, and think about specific goals/projects. I mean, can you even solder? Can you read a circuit diagram? Have you ever played with CAD software, Google Sketch etc?

I would suggest:

a) hanging around with, or working on a project with a friend who is handy. No offense, but your examples above are all over the map. 3D Printers do not go with Arduino's do not go with smart houses, pretty much. Those are all separate things with their own types of expertise. If you have a handy friend who has done something that interests you, ask them how they did it, get their links etc, and then have a crack at it yourself, or propose something you can do together.

b) Look up your local community college, polytechnic university or whatever the heck they call it there, and see if there are some courses you are interested in like basic electronics, etc etc. Enrol in one. The bonus of doing so is that it will put you in touch with lots of people from category a.

That's a pretty good start. Also, I don't want to sound patronising, but google. Your Smart House plan, for example. There are thousands of pages by people who have done, and are doing this. Many of them are super accessible, and better yet, associated with forums where you can ask questions, share tips etc etc.

Forget Tony Stark completely, even as an ideal. That shit's not real, homie.
posted by smoke at 7:28 PM on May 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

Local robotics club or hackerspace.

Also check out a local class in casting-moldmaking or cabinetmaking. Both of which aren't 'dude, flying robots!' but have a host of useful crossover skills.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:56 PM on May 26, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I'd start by doing a bunch of freebie Home Depot workshops, then courses in welding and metalworking at my local community "idea foundry" center thing, meanwhile hanging out with the local groups dedicated to rebuilding computers and/or operating ham radios. For programming and mathematics, Open CourseWare and Khan Academy are enough to get you started; hooking up with open-source software projects is the way to get your skills up once you have the basics down (actually doing real projects is mandatory for programming, as far as I'm concerned.) Messing around with electronics fun kits would be the after-dinner activity of choice, obviously.

(Tony's last remaining major skill area, IIRC, is engines, which I don't know anything about how to learn other than going through community college or apprenticing yourself to a mechanic.)
posted by SMPA at 8:38 PM on May 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

Auto shop will give you a good idea of how engines work, what tools do which jobs, what good engineering looks like and what kinds of designs get sneered at by the people who have to fix them.

Some cities have tool sharing types of set ups. Some cities still have vocational programs for car repair. Barring that, buy a junky car and it's Chilton's or Haynes book and take the car apart to rebuild it. Repeat as necessary while taking physics and math classes on the side. Then take design and business classes.
posted by bilabial at 9:05 PM on May 26, 2013

Well, there are a lot of people "like" Tony Stark, but in a more limited sense. There are people who can do anything you can imagine to a car -- think Monster Garage. There are master carpenters who can walk onto a jobsite and fix your leaning deck. There are chefs who can walk into a restaurant and make it incredible.

To be a true multi-disciplinary is both rare and difficult. You yourself may only be good at one thing but when you decide to make something, the genius is in how you choose to make it with you -- the best hydraulics guy, or the best spot welder, or the best embedded-systems coder.

There are some really amazing engineers out there who are real-world problem solvers, but they mostly work within a specialized discipline, e.g. bridge-building. To be a generalist often requires giving up depth in the majority of what you're working with.
posted by dhartung at 11:31 PM on May 26, 2013

Own a junkyard? That's how the bear suit guy rolls [Project Grizzly].

Yeah, that's Troy Hurtubise. He was fascinated by bears, he watched RoboCop, and he said "Why not?"

So be a tinkerer and have the materials, tools, time, space, and money to play around with stuff. Then develop an obsession to solve a focused problem.

You could start by acquiring a good-sized workshop on a good-sized piece of land out where people won't bother you about things you might try (stuff that blows up, stuff that goes flying up into the sky, stuff what roars around the ground, etc.). And develop practical skills such as metalworking and welding that you could put to profitable purpose while you're working on your project. Develop the right set of friends, too. You'll learn a lot by working with people who know a lot about what you're trying to do. If you enable their habits, they'll be happy to work on your stuff.
posted by pracowity at 3:13 AM on May 27, 2013

Step one is to read Oliver Postgate's autobiography, a joyful description of haveagoness and stickatitness.
posted by BenPens at 4:58 AM on May 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

Just as a counterpoint to some of the earlier answers I'd like to say that I liked the Tony Stark framing. I get what you mean.

Your profile doesn't say where you are, if you were in London I would say step one would be to go hang out with these guys or a version of them from wherever you live.

Hack spaces are groups of people who come together to make cool stuff. There are many hack days and events all over the place. Go to them, soak up the atmosphere, see what's going on and get inspiration.

But most importantly, just try to make something. Find a problem you want to solve, build a solution. Learn as you go. At first it all looks impossible, but before long the impossible will seem easy, and you'll work on the new impossible thing. When you get stuck ask the internet, because it is full of people trying to make cool stuff and learning from each other.

This:
"I want to turn my house into a smart-house over the next year with a central Linux server and some off the shelf sensors in my spare time"
doesn't need to be step B, make it step A.
It's basically what I'm doing at the moment.
Buy some sensors try to get the data into a computer. (Maybe a temperature sensor) Do it again. Then try using the sensors to make something happen.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 9:45 AM on May 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't know how much of this has to do with your own internal workings, but look. I've been watching the new show DaVinci's Demons and the way they portray Leonardo is as someone who can't look at anything in the world without mentally breaking it down to figure out how it works. I get that he's a, well, a Tony Stark - an outlier. But do you have that sort of itch to figure things out?

When you are dicing vegetables, do you mentally divide it into grid-like pieces before you cut? While you are brushing your teeth, do you try to figure out how exactly how the battery recharges when there are no metallic bits to connect? When you look at a cabinet, can you mentally see the way the hinges and drawer slides work, even before you open it?

If you have that kind of curiosity, then it almost doesn't matter which path you take - you'll get there.
posted by CathyG at 10:09 AM on May 27, 2013

I think you can make progress with the mechanical aspects by doing practical work and learning the tools as you go. You probably shouldn't run for the 3D-printer, but learn to make drawings and make yourself comfortable in a metal workshop. To do good electronics, you'd benefit from some more theoretical education. Circuits are more difficult to design than to make, and many things require mathematical knowledge, including calculus and complex algebra. The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill is everyone's favorite book on the topic, and it covers practical aspects as well as circuit theory.

I work in a physics lab and that's a pretty good place to learn about making both mechanical and electrical things. Experimentation is encouraged and there are often difficult limits that you're trying to push against. The constraints force you to try unusual methods and materials, and I think working with extreme cases may help to develop physical intuition. You'd want to complement that with other jobs of course, like being a stagehand at a small theater and doing custom car mods in a garage, probably some sysadmin and other things also. But from my field, let me recommend Building scientific apparatus by Moore, Davis and Coplan. It's a bit arbitrary what topics it goes into deeply and which ones it doesn't touch, but it reads like porn nonetheless.
posted by springload at 3:05 PM on May 27, 2013

Best answer: I think you can make progress with the mechanical aspects by doing practical work and learning the tools as you go. You probably shouldn't run for the 3D-printer, but learn to make drawings and make yourself comfortable in a metal workshop. To do good electronics, you'd benefit from some more theoretical education.

I agree with springload. Learning the more 'fundamental' knowledge is often the hardest part, but is essential when you're trying to make sense of how everything fits together. The easiest route to this is probably to enroll in a mechatronics or electrical engineering program in university, or if that's not possible to look up the courses for one of them and teach yourself, noting the prerequisites and doing those first. After that, consider branching into computer science (machine learning) or materials science. Some courses might seem useless because they're so abstract, but eventually it all comes full circle.

For example, say you want to build an autonomous flying suit. You'd need to know trajectory planning, which involves advanced dynamics, and to study that calculus must be second nature. If you want your flying suit to hover in place you need to know control theory, which heavily uses linear algebra. Computer vision and image processing for sensing the environment uses a lot of signal processing theory. You might be able work on a higher level and abstract away the low level electrical engineering like digital logic gates, but when a problem occurs it helps to know it or know of it. You'd also probably need to numerically solve differential equations, perhaps to isolate for the amount of thrust you need. Some materials background to help you choose your metal. And some insight in other fields such as numerical optimization techniques and machine learning to make it smart. The more practical skills of soldering, programming and networking aren't necessarily easier but rely less on prior knowledge so they can be learned on-the-go.

"I want to turn my house into a smart-house over the next year with a central Linux server and some off the shelf sensors in my spare time"

If this is a concrete goal, you can probably skip the engineering degree first and try and find a hobbyist forum with people who do this. It might be a lot more rewarding, especially if you don't have the support network of physically being in school. If you're more into making cool software, another cool way get results quick is to buy a toy quadrotor like the Parrot AR Drone (or a similar off-the-shelf robot, see Willow Garage) and make it run autonomously through your house, which is surprisingly not too difficult because it already has its own control systems in place.

In any case the main challenge is probably staying motivated. Tony Stark does it all by himself, but in real life it's hard to work on the same problem for months without some sort of support from others or some indication that it's going right. I think that's why the people pursing these electromechanical systems are generally hobbyists, who have their own careers and stay motivated by seeing pragmatic results with relative certainty, or researchers, that have the peer environment to motivate them to dive into the unknown.
posted by spec at 2:31 PM on May 28, 2013

Best answer: I have some advice that may be of use.

Remember that we walk on the backs of giants long since busy bent over fixing things from past decades so we have less problems to solve today.
Read the entire McMaster Carr catalog from cover to cover. They have very very informative descriptions about metals, plastics, seals, bearings, foam, fasteners and pipe sizes.

For starting building things like small boxes or formed shapes that must enclose something:
1/16" and 1/8" thick polycarbonate that can be cut with tin snips, or simply scored with a knife and snapped/bent. Polycarbonate can also be heat bent over short distances to make brackets or angular origami folded box parts.

For light and medium duty open box frames and general reinforcement, 80/20 extruded aluminum is fast and relatively easy to cut with a wood miter saw. Its end's have a center hole that can accept a tap to thread a bolt into the end, further providing attachment points.

For heavy duty frames and people holding structures, mig welding mild steel.

For very large truss-like structures that must be cheap, fast to assemble and light to medium strong. Tube connection insert nuts placed into the ends of EMT electrical conduit or any type of thin wall pipe. Connection points can be fist sized spheres or angle brackets with bolt heads accessible for tightening.

For large structures that must be strong, adaptable, and shapely: scrap wood, and a butane powered nail gun.

For small pivots, drill a hole into two parts, and use a very slightly loose bolt with a nylon insert lock nut.

For medium pivots, shoulder bolts with brass bushings.

For heavy duty pivots, pillow block bearings and keyed drive shafts.

For robot platforms, standoffs and spacers between plates of matching holes.

Five Essential Hand Tools:
Battery Drill
Leatherman Wave
Big needle nose vice grips.
Heavy duty tape measure

Three Essential Measurement Tools:
Heavy duty tape measure
Dial measurement calipers
Bubble level on rotation ring on a carpenter's level.

Four Essential Safety Items:
Glasses or Face shield
Leather gloves
Expensive dust mask.
Welding Jacket or heavy bib apron

This article was written by a MIT professor discussing the many construction techniques employed for the student projects apart of the MIT school of engineering.
posted by piratebrine at 8:20 PM on June 23, 2013 [2 favorites]