I wish I could have. The jackscrew was made by Saginaw Gear, a rather awesome company that did all Boeing's jackscrew work. I would have really liked to see that forging made. Probably the only better metalwork would be that on a turbine blade.
> Did you think it would actually be built as designed
Of course. You can't build modern airplanes any other way.
> did you always assume there would be some additional degrees of freedom or out of tolerance build you didn’t account for?
Nope. I accounted for the tolerances specified for all the parts it was to be connected to. When the airplane #1 was built, the jackscrew fit perfectly on the first try, which surprised the old mechanics working on it :-) It was my job to account for everything anyone could think of. It really wasn't a miracle or anything, just arithmetic.
Your response really surprises me. There may still be pockets of folks that work that way but by and and large the most I’d expect to see now out of the big aerospace manufacturers is a Monte Carlo simulation of the tolerance stack with a assumed normal distribution centered around nominal. Very unlikely to account for all the tolerance possibilities or even skewed distribution. Even that would be unusually detailed amount of engineering that you might only see on something as critical as the jack screw you worked on.
No, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. If you're referring to the Alaska Air crash, the design of the jackscrew assembly was much older. The accident wasn't caused by a manufacturing fault in it. The design had problems, the maintenance on it was difficult, and pilot should have stopped trying to move it when it showed signs of trouble.
The other crash involving jackscrew failure (on a 747) was when an unsecured armored personnel carrier slid back and fell on it, snapping it. You can't really blame the jackscrew for that. No airplane is designed to handle heavy iron cargo flopping about in the hold.
> Did you think it would actually be built as designed
Of course. You can't build modern airplanes any other way.
> did you always assume there would be some additional degrees of freedom or out of tolerance build you didn’t account for?
Nope. I accounted for the tolerances specified for all the parts it was to be connected to. When the airplane #1 was built, the jackscrew fit perfectly on the first try, which surprised the old mechanics working on it :-) It was my job to account for everything anyone could think of. It really wasn't a miracle or anything, just arithmetic.