If You Want To Do It, You Can Do It
After publishing the first scientific research book written in English, I found a key to write an English language book in the mechanical engineering application. In fact, if I say it is a key rather than it is just self-confidence. When I was a master degree candidate in China twenty-nine years ago, I never imagined that some day I was able to document my jobs in a book, and especially an English book in the USA. Any thing can happen overnight instead of more than two decades.
Why Did I Write This Book?
Back to the time of 1987-1990, I undertook two roles: one was a graduate student and another one was a teacher. As a student, I studied for earning my master degree with three supervisors. As a teacher, I taught the mechanical design course with them in same department. At the same time, they were not only my teachers but also my colleagues. They are always appreciated for giving me significant suggestions and advices with my project and teaching career. It is with much personal sadness that Professor Zhao and Professor Wang already passed away. God blesses them to be peaceful in the heaven. It is so glad to know that Professor Shi lives in China. God blesses her to be heathy and have long lives.
Dr. Liu is my husband and also my graduate college classmate. We both have been educated and worked in China, and then we traveled to overseas for pursuing our new lives. He had given me tremendous help with writing English language articles, which published in international conferences. Those practices built a foundation for me later to write many international journal articles so that I was full of confidence to write books in English.
Topic of this book is about the bending strength of a special type of gear: circular-arc tooth-trace (CATT) cylindrical gear. The main sources come from my master degree thesis. In past two decades, I kept an eye on the international publications and quite often searched the relevant topics, but fewer reports were found. It seemed the studies on this kind of gear were almost stopped due to hard manufacturing and other application problems. Gradually, this research area became pale from my brain.
The turning point came in 2017, as I visited my hometown and also my mother college in China. In my mom’s room, an old bookshelf drew me attention. To my surprised was that my master degree thesis was still laid on her bookshelf after more than twenty-seven years. It was hard to believe she even kept my early publications. It was amazing that she knew how important those materials were for me. She had moved for several times, and then those materials were never missed. She was deserved my deepest gratitude again. I was so proud of having such a knowledgeable mother and was touched by her concern and attention. This touched feeling trigged me to read them again. I found that some of our early jobs still took a significant role in new type of gear research & development field. This fact inspired me to re-pick up the topics. My self-confidence promoted me to translate the thesis into an English language book for sharing the ideas in the worldwide. Just because of this trip, the thesis and all publications were brought to the USA as the primary materials for writing this book.
How Did I Write This Book?
Nothing is easy, but nothing is impossible. I started at the chapter of mechanics modeling of tooth. Translation from Chinese into English was a big challenge, because I was not familiar with the gear terminology in English. Living overseas, I have learned large amount of English technical languages on the mining machinery in past decades. Unfortunately, I never touched any technical nomenclature related to the gear area. Even though I had enough materials to fill in my book, my brain didn’t have enough English words to express them. It was absolutely not good idea to translate words one by one. Google translator was helpful, but not perfect because some of nomenclatures were not translated correctly. My steps became slowly and had to search the relevant articles for references. The problem just liked I mentioned before, there weren’t enough this kind of publications written using native English language. Some publications were written by schoolers who had English as second language. The technical methodologies were good, but there were many grammar problems.
In that moment, my three international conference articles published twenty years ago did a great help to me. They were written by cutting and translating from my master degree thesis. My husband did most translating jobs for all three. His writing skill was better than mine because by that time he had already published more than ten articles in the international journals. Taking this space, I would like to offer him my sincere appreciation for his support and motivation. Referring those articles, I got the clue for my book. The terminologies in three articles were enough to support me to write fluently in English. I didn’t copy all things from them rather than I had added much more new thoughts in the book. Furthermore, I reorganized my publications, reports, test data and thesis. Some of them had been done in the university when I worked as a graduate student. Some of them had been published in Chinese language. Facing these publications and documents, my mind was running. I suddenly realized my career in CATT gear field, which have stopped for more than twenty years, could be lasted again in the future, if I didn’t give up.
My motivation to write this book was inspired and I started to put an extreme enthusiasm to work on this book. This is my second time to write a scientific research book using English language. It is need the knowledge, experience, writing skill, patience, encouragement and strength. It seemed no more difficult to do this project than to do the first book, since I already knew how to organize and arrange a book. The more I write, the more I feel excited. I could not be able to stop my writing and even weekend days. Until one day, I felt my eyes were tearing and painful, I had had to stop for several weeks and try to take a rest, empty mind, and calm down.
Restarting to work on this book, I reformed my way. For example, I divided working time to several short segments. Every time, I concentrated on one sub-topic and controlled time within one hour and then forced me to pause for doing the eye exercise. Just following this kind of arrangement, I finished section by section and chapter by chapter.
Job went to the experiment part. All the experimental devices and instruments were designed and manufactured by me twenty-eight years ago. I doubted if the method was new enough to share with reader. I searched some experimental methods used to measure other kind of gears, and found the fundamental principles were same. Actually, the sharing idea is my purpose in this book. The method may not be perfect, but sometimes it doesn’t need to be perfect. I realized that if I constantly worried about if my book could be perfect, I would never get it done. I just want that all readers can get some useful information from my job.
In 2018, my efforts brought this book to completion. It took around ten months to achieve this project; while preparation may last 10 years or even more decades. I can say that the book was started with my three years’ graduate study from accumulating materials through setting up experiments to documenting thesis. I want to say that it came from my constant research during twelve years’ faculty experience. I have to say that it also came from my overseas practices in the academic and industrial fields. Now, the book is drafted in a manuscript and published. This long journey eventually comes to an end as a result of a book, which condensates the efforts of all contributors.
Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1729625134
