After I walked out of our first class session of the semester, I was left with so many questions. I had never designed a machine before. I had never operated large machinery, fabricated parts or even used computers to help design the parts. It is safe to say my experience for the whole process was well, zero. But for some reason I felt that the project assigned to us was so juvenile and easy. My ego made me believe that this project was not something for a Michigan engineer or a junior in a highly respected university. Of course though, I was wrong.
My attitude to the whole project in the beginning was pretty off. I was not interested in working with a team because I wanted to implement my ideas and strategies alone. I was not interested in going about the machine or the strategy in any other way but mine. I also did not believe the work load was for a group of four either. This of course was before we made teams. It was not until after teams where made that I started to come around.
During the actual lab sessions, groups where created and things started to roll pretty quickly. Ideas where constantly being bounced around and strategies formulated. Every individual had constructive criticism that really benefitted the project. I slowly started to come to terms with the idea of the team. Also as we continued to go lecture, the whole design process was explained and broken down to us in steps. This made the whole process a little bit more easier to follow and allowed for us to move forward smoothly.
When the announcement for the project was made I believed it to be to easy. I quickly realized how wrong I was. I began to feel slightly overwhelmed about the project at hand. There was still so many questions and things to do. Designing the project on the computer was alien to me. Deciding what materials to make the machine out of was just as difficult. What really helped was the lab tutorials that was given on SolidWorks. These tutorials were literally my first exposure to engineering software and it did a great job on introducing its capabilities. I was even impressed that we were shown a resource to educate us on materials. This is where the labs really took care of my concerns while we worked on our project and was undoubtably crucial to our design.
As the project started to develop and move further along, more and more issues seem to arise. The design process as a whole exposed to me how easy it is to overlook certain things. One of the major issues my team faced was how to assemble the machine together. We never really took the time to make in SolidWorks the locations of the screw holes or label how each piece attaches to one another. If I could go back to the beginning this would definitely be one of the things I would have liked to have change. In my opinion, If you could emphasize this issue way more during the designing portion of the class. If you could require students to include in their SolidWork’s model how each part connects to each other. It would save headaches for teams further down the road.
As an introduction to design and fabrication, I feel ME250 did a great job. The introductory project was not to simple and not to difficult to handle. It exposes students to all areas of the design and manufacturing processes. Even though this semester was a mixture of emotions for teams, I am defiantly happy that I took this course. The experience I gained from It gave me the hands on skills I need and the teamwork mentality to further my development as a Michigan Engineer.
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