ME250 turned out to be a lot more work than I initially expected. It was very stressful at times, very fun at others, but overall an extremely rewarding experience. I learned that I can function on almost no sleep over 4 days, but my friends start to get annoyed by my bad sense of humor. I also learned that tolerances really, really, REALLY suck. Plastic gears are now something I have nightmares about. I know what time the shop closes, what time it opens, and I’ve seen how fast the clock moves when I have a deadline to meet. I know when my part on the lathe is spinning wrong that I’m going to have to start over again. I know that to tap a ¼’’ hole to ¼ 20, I can’t drill it with a 1/4’’ drill bit and expect it to work. I learned too late that the entire lecture series was posted online, and I finally learned what it felt like to be accused of blogging too much. I learned drawings cannot ever be dimensioned correctly, and GSIs are actually pretty helpful if you’re nice to them. And those are only the tip of the iceberg consisting useful things I learned in this course.
What I learned about actual design and manufacturing? Well I will admit I learned a lot even if it’s not the first thing that I want to brag about. The whole initial design process was pretty sweet, and the huge collection of ideas was pretty crazy. I must say I really enjoyed the lectures on how people think, and adapting to have the best creative process. Design was pretty relaxed, more so than any other part of the course and it almost put me off guard for the manufacturing. Yes, the manufacturing, the most time crunched portion of my entire life with the exception of a few other times for effect. I did learn how to make stuff, and stuff I did make in any way possible- mill, lathe, hack-saw, a lot of filling, and even a bit of precision drill pressing. I learned all the names of parts and tools, and when I forgot them I affectionately referred to them as the “thing to the thingy” or some sort of similar variation coupled with some vague hand motions. I usually got my point across.
I like to think that my team liked me, I mean, they laughed at my jokes most of the time. Once they even told me I needed to remake a part without swearing, which was pretty nice of them. I find you really hit this time, somewhere well beyond 30 hours of no sleep that I classify as “building character/ bonding time” and since we hit that more than once, I’d say that we did alright. Everyone’s still alive right? As for time management, that kind of gets tossed out the window. Our time management consisted of, “is the shop open?”, “we still have stuff to do…”, and finally the very misleading “we are almost done!”. In all reality we stuck to our schedule pretty good, but there came a point when the shop hours/other teams in the shop wouldn’t allow us to get everything done as quickly as we’d have liked.
This course wasn’t very well planned in all honesty. Time wise, way too much time was spent playing around with the design stuff, and the jump to actually making stuff wasn’t even close to being soon enough. The game was really over the top, which led to a lot of teams failing to even score a ball, very boring and a bad taste to those who put in all the long hours. The shop needs more machines, more space, and better tools (new stuff anyone? Please?). The ME250 shop was more like a MEeveryone shop with the other classes doing their stuff there too. The only good thing about the shop was John and Bob, they are really lifesavers. Also I’ll give a hand to the GSI’s they were the best crew I’ve seen and were really helpful. The same however, cannot be said for the lecturers. They were really good lectures, but pretty much faded out of the picture and I only saw them in the shop once or twice. Maybe it was just the second year blues, but this class was a ton of work. However, that said, I’d take it again and enjoy it all the same. ZEUS: careful do not touch our bot…
-Ryan
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