Ryan Lippmann — Orange County

I'm Ryan Lippmann, and I work in Orange County, California, where construction project management is my profession and automotive engineering is the work I do outside of it. This page covers the second category: a truck build I've been developing over several years, and a front engine accessory drive (FEAD) design tool I wrote to solve a problem that kept coming up during that build.

Background

My day-to-day work is construction. I've spent more than twenty years as a senior project manager in California, and I run Pacific Project Controls, a consulting practice focused on project controls and delivery. I also founded TuneView, an automotive tuning analysis platform.

The engineering projects below sit between those two things. They use the same habits — define the constraint set, document assumptions, verify before committing — applied to hardware instead of buildings.

Truck Build

The truck build is an ongoing personal engineering project. Rather than treating it as a parts-swap exercise, I've approached it the way I'd approach a construction package: scope defined up front, interfaces identified, and each subsystem checked against the others before anything gets ordered. The dated record of what is actually installed lives on the build page.

That approach surfaces problems early. Accessory drive geometry is a good example. Changing a water pump, alternator position, or crank pulley diameter affects belt wrap, tensioner travel, and pulley speed ratios all at once. Getting one of those wrong doesn't show up until the belt is on the engine and something is squealing, slipping, or throwing itself off at speed.

I kept working that geometry by hand. Eventually it made more sense to write a tool.

FEAD Design Tool

The front engine accessory drive is the belt system that runs the alternator, water pump, power steering, air conditioning compressor, and anything else driven off the crankshaft. Designing one means choosing pulley positions and diameters that deliver correct speeds to every accessory while keeping enough belt wrap on each pulley for the belt to transmit torque without slipping — and keeping the tensioner inside its working range.

The tool I built handles that layout problem. Given pulley positions and diameters, it computes belt path geometry, wrap angles, and the resulting drive ratios, so a proposed configuration can be evaluated before parts are purchased or brackets are fabricated. It sits alongside the other open tools I publish.

The value is the same as it is in construction: catching a coordination conflict on paper costs almost nothing. Catching it in the field costs schedule, money, and rework.

How the Two Fields Connect

Construction project management and mechanical design share more than people assume. Both are constraint problems. Both fail in the same way — not because any single component is wrong, but because two correct components were specified without checking how they meet. Both reward the person who does the coordination work before commitment rather than after. That parallel is the subject of Grading a Tune Like a Jobsite.

Working on hardware has made me better at the day job. There's no ambiguity in a belt that won't fit. The feedback is immediate and it isn't negotiable, which is a useful counterweight to a profession where problems can stay hidden behind paperwork for months.

Contact

I'm based in Orange County, California. My professional work is at Pacific Project Controls, and TuneView is at tuneview.io.