In this course, I learned quite a bit about design and manufacturing. I had limited manufacturing experience in the past, so this course was a good opportunity to familiarize myself with the equipment used in the shop. This course was also a good opportunity for me to learn about the design process and to design something from start to finish.
For teamwork, I learned that not everyone needs to be an expert in the material to be a good team member, or be a credit to the team. I also learned how if one team member puts forth a poor effort, the whole team suffers greatly.
On time management, I learned that working in small chunks along the way is better than doing everything all at once, especially in the shop. In CAD, it’s often better to do a part or assembly from start to finish, but in the shop, working in small chunks is much more efficient.
Improvements to the Course:
This class was recently revamped, so there were many rough edges about the whole thing, it seemed. The overall concept was good: to make a machine that actually performs a function, rather than something with no real purpose. One thing that I found was that the initial expectations were rather high. Not a single team was capable of scoring into the bins, and a large number of teams (my own included) were struggling with simply moving the ping-pong balls themselves.
A large part of this was time. I felt like the first half of the course was nothing but filler. Most of the homework assignments seemed like a combination of busy-work and basic physics or mechanics. What I mean by this is that anything that was covered by these, the students should already know, or be in the course that teaches it in-depth. Even if not everyone in a team knows basic mechanical analysis, there will be at least one member who can do it. All this time spent on these assignments takes away from the project, which is supposed to be the main purpose of the class. I felt that all the project milestones were extremely rushed, and the overall timing was poor.
That being said, the CAD assignments were very useful to learn Solid Works, in my opinion, and I enjoyed doing modeling for the most part. The CAD aspect of this class is just fine, though a slightly faster timetable might be considered to allow for more project time. With fewer homework assignments, this would be very reasonable.
My Improvements:
I could have improved my performance in one extremely easy way: constraint. I and my team had a good design, but the major shortcoming was constraint. Our initial design was grossly under-constrained, and this proved to be a fatal blow. The worm gear that we used was practically useless, which is not good since it was our MCM. Towards the end (i.e. the last few days), we added additional constraint to the worm shaft, but due to the last-minute nature, we ran into binding issues. We then added constraint to the other side of the worm (something we should have done to begin with), but that didn’t fox the binding. If we had designed the worm shaft properly, everything would have worked perfectly. However, I was stupid and thought that one-sided constraint would have been enough. I made the same mistake on the rack and pinion, only constraining it on one side. This was also a problem for us, though not as critical. We were able to constrain it with string, but that is clearly not a well-designed fix, and it showed. So that’s the major mistake that our team made: under-constraining critical parts.
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