The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-

Re: Reconstruction Resources Library

Rod Macdonald (frmrmtr@aol.com)
Wed, 26 Nov 1997 00:31:02 -0500 (EST)

SAE also has an online bookstore at their website (www.sae.org - there's a link on the TARO contents page), it has a very good selection of titles covering reconstruction and a broad range of other related topics - biomechanics, auto design, and such...

For myself (and mind you I still consider myself pretty new at this), my personal and department budgets pretty much have forced me to get along with the Nortwestern TAR manual, and whatever other manuals, SAE papers, and articles I've accumulated from the schools I've attended and I do ok by that, but one day I'm gonna raid that bookstore big time.... for now here's what my "beg, borrow, or steal" program looks like:

The Dept. did pick up Accident Reconstruction for Windows (www.mecg.com) and it's been very good to me, it also prints out very clean and professional looking. If I have a gripe it's that some of the formulas are outside my training and experience and tempting as they might be to use - I have to be able to explain 'em later... one of the dangers of "numbers crunching" programs.
The rest of the programs I have are free downloads and shareware from the internet - couple of which are in the contents page here. While, for the most part they all use the same basic formulas, I find that each one has some individual feature or characteristic that makes me prefer it to the others for a particular task.

Regardless of what I do use - I still go over it all with a pencil and a calculator, otherwise I'd feel like I'd trained for a marathon all year, then taken the bus for 26 miles...

The CADD program Autosketch 2.1 (about $100) and the 3 day Autosketch class that UCR and Kerry Berg put on ($295, www.unex.ucr.edu/fis/tar.html) are probably the best investments I've made so far. I highly recommend both - it's an excellent program but I could never have used it to the extent I that I have without the class.

and don't overlook Internet access - there's a wealth of information out there - and I'm filling notebooks with it.

So I don't know if mine's the "expert" opinion you're looking for, but I look at any information I can get my hands on as essential, and I covet whatever I don't have... And remember, as widely recognized and essential as anything may be according to the experts - there'll always be a expert on the other side to tell the jury that whatever you think is a crock......

Mac
Rod Macdonald
frmrmtr@aol.com

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