About
About Engineering ABC
Engineering ABC is a preservation and modernization of an engineering knowledge platform built over four decades by Anton van Beek at Delft University of Technology.
Anton van Beek
Anton van Beek (dr.ir.) is an engineer and lecturer at TU Delft, in the department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering. Over roughly twenty-seven years he built a body of work on tribology, bearing design and machine reliability: the book Advanced Engineering Design, a large set of engineering calculators, an encyclopedia of technical articles, and the courses taught to engineers in industry. His work is referenced by universities including Cambridge, Concordia and TU Delft.
The material was first published on werktuigbouw.nl from 1999 onward. Engineering ABC carries it into a modern, durable home so it stays available — and citable — for the engineers who rely on it.
Contact: info@werktuigbouw.nl
Migration status
This is an active preservation project. The original site was captured read-only on 14 August 2026 as a reference snapshot; nothing on the legacy sites was modified. The initial crawl identified 162 distinct calculation models; 161 were genuine engineering calculators (the 162nd was a generic free-text scientific expression evaluator, correctly left out of scope) — all migrated and validated against the original. Later work found more real, previously-unclassified calculators beyond that first count — including some that existed only in the English legacy tree, and some demo-locked calculators unlocked as honest fixed-geometry versions — bringing the live total to 188, all migrated and validated the same way. The encyclopedia has grown similarly: from the initial 30 distinct articles to 68 today — 28 published in both languages, 7 in English only, and 5 that exist only in Dutch and are preserved as such.
| Item | Catalogued (legacy) | Live here | Validated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calculators | ~162 | 188 | 188 |
| Encyclopedia articles | ~30 | 68 | — |
| Reachable legacy pages | ~330 | — | — |
| Preserved PDFs | 50 | — | — |
Migration priority ran from the scarce core outward: gas & spiral-groove bearings first, then hydrostatic, EHL/film thickness, wear, reliability and general calculations. A machine-readable inventory lives in docs/legacy-url-map.csv.
How the engineering logic is preserved
The calculators are a literal port of the original client-side JavaScript. No formula is re-derived, and no computation is quietly replaced. Each migrated calculator is checked by an automated golden-master test that runs the original code as the source of truth and requires the new result to match it exactly.