So I spent 5 or 6 hours last night trying to hook up a mini Stirling engine with the gearbox of a Tamiya track module. Haven't been staying up late for a while. I wrapped up around 4 am. Well, guess i under estimated the 'engineering' difficulty.
-Pricision matters. Seriously. (This is something a Chinese person lacks, not sure if it's our culture: Zhongyong(中庸），we seem to be okay with not being perfect.)
-Friction is your enemy. Even a slight resistance could break down the system.
-Sense of beauty, there's always the aesthetics part. (Which a Chinese person lacks also.)
-To make some parts from scratch is really a bad idea. You probably don't have the tools, molds, materials, cutting machines that you need to make something that is of high quality and can work seamlessly with other gears. This may change when 3D printing become a household tool. Well, technologies have always been empowering a normal person. Cars, telephones, computers, those used to be owned only by a small percentage of people, are now commodities.
/*a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price/*
As a software engineer, I rarely need to deal with the physical parts, and everything is bounded within the programmable environment. Till now, I realize that so many mechanics have been implemented in mechanical engineering in similiar way. Of course, there is a gradual evolution from mechanical to electrical to software engineering–it took some 600 hundred years (maybe even longer) of iterations and knowledge buildup to climb the tech tree. The craftsmanship is strong in westerners. An average person could fix the car or build circuits for electric toys. Japan started late, but their technicians are among the world's best.