I learned a lot about design and manufacturing, teamwork and time management, and dealing with changing design parameters in ME250. All of these topics will continue to appear in the next two and a half years at Michigan and in the real world. Most of the learning that took place is not easily broken into categories and is not easy to teach, instead we worked through the entire design process in very little time and learned a lot about the process and ourselves.
First and foremost I learned a lot about design and manufacturing in ME250. It is one thing to sit through lectures and do problems sets, but it is quite another to actually design, model, revise, present, and build a machine that accomplishes a specific task. The first really important skill I acquired in the course was being able to use SolidWorks. This will be very useful for both future class work and work with extracurricular project teams. The modeling I did both in class and on our project allowed me to work through plenty of problems with the software. The next really important skill, or rather set of skills, were machining skills. Although I came in with some abilities on the lathe, laser cutter, and mill, I explored the limits of the machines a lot more in detail. Specifically, I learned that a rubber collate in a lathe can be used for many sizes of stock but easily gets misaligned or loose. Also, the mill can cut an angle by using an angle finder to place the part in the vice and face milling. In addition, the mill can pocket plastics but it acrylic smells horrible when doing so and at least an eighth of an inch of material should be left at the bottom of the pocket so the piece remains rigid and does not crack. One of our other downfalls was scaling on the laser cutter; it is not always easy to not realize scaling issues until the piece is already cut if the original designer is not on hand. These few examples are just a few of the things I learned in the shop while working on our project.
Secondly, my team and I worked very hard to excel in teamwork and time management. The solid model was extremely hard to organize because all four of us were coming up with new versions of parts constantly. We were able to establish a revision system that worked quite well but even then we had issues. As far as managing our time and meeting deadlines I feel like we did quite a good job considering the time frame and constant rule changes. This was one of the most successful teams, in terms of equal contributions and collaboration, I have been a part of and we didn’t really have many conflicts between members.
Finally, I personally learned a lot about the design process in this class. Although I was not a huge fan of the artsy, creative aspect of the class, I feel like I learned a lot about the basic design principles that are standard procedure out in industry. I also learned more in depth about the parameters and terminology of small components and the lecture slides will be great references for the future.
In order to improve ME250 I think there are a lot of different things that could be done. First, I am a little unclear about the connection between the artist and the drawing in perspective assignment to the class and to our project. I would have rather used that lecture time to go over more engineering drawing concepts. Second, I feel like the homeworks could be improved by focusing possibly on real-world design problems. This semester they felt scattered and I did not really get much out of them. Also more small projects in the shop would have been extremely helpful for those that came in with no machining experience because the rest of us ended up either doing almost all of the machining, baby sitting them, or wasting their time by having them make the same part over again. These small projects could even take over Design Workshop because I feel that at until we got into groups that was not very useful. The one exam should either be split up into two exams or should be wildly shortened so that students have time to be creative and show what they know. There is a lot of material but it does not make sense to force students to rush through everything. For the main project I think the biggest two things that could be fixed are finalizing all rules at the very beginning of the semester and actually enforcing the rules during the competition. Although it is quite sad if a team works all semester on a project and then is not able to compete, it is even worse to punish teams that follow the rules by letting rule-breaking teams compete. Finally, although there may be no way to do this, it would be extremely helpful for teams if they could work in both the DW and the machine shop on weekends.
I am happy with my personal performance and my teams performance in the class. Still, the largest place I could have improved was the homework. Even though I completely understood the homework assignments and spent plenty of time on them, I did not get the grade I would have liked. For my team, I think we could have started machining a little earlier, but we came out about where we wanted to be.
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