ME 250 made for a very interesting semester. Even though it started out slowly with designing and CAD labs, it quickly became very intense once team design and manufacturing started. Even though I feel I learned much more outside of lecture than in lecture, the lectures were very important to make sure you understood the basic concepts. If you didn’t, it made for a very challenging time in the shop. For instance, because our machine had multiple moving parts that had to fit together perfectly, if we didn’t understand tolerances, our machine could not have worked at all. All of the lecture topics came into play in the design process of our machine, Linkages, belts, gears, racks and pinions, power screws, couplings. If we hadn’t covered these topics in lecture, our machine probably would have come out much different. I was familiar with the design process from my Engin 100 class and the Baja team but this class through something completely different at us. The design for this class made us think of what concepts were good and bad. It then made us think how they could be defeated and what could we do to stop that. It turned out to be a very difficult process because there is only so many ways that you can play the game of Slotbots. We knew that there were going to be a lot of teams doing the same thing because of the limited number of ways to play. So we tried to design a Slotbot to account for all of these strategies.
Working in teams proved to be very difficult at times. It is impossible to think of everything that could go wrong or new ideas when you are with your team. Sometimes I would just be in the library or doing homework and realize that some part of our design just wouldn’t work or that there is an easier way to do it. Trying to get a hold of everyone to let them know to hear what they think proved difficult. It also proved difficult when you come up with an idea, draw it in CAD while at the same time, someone else was modeling something different in CAD. It would have saved a lot of time if we could have met to discuss every detail but that’s impossible with different schedules. When we did finally decide on a design, it was very difficult getting everyone in the shop to work on the project. I didn’t want to leave anyone out of building so at first we tried to get everyone in the shop at a time. This proved to difficult so we worked mostly in groups of two or three at a time. Again coming up with ideas as you are machining proved difficult to get approval from the rest of the team but you just had to work on instinct. Working in teams was a great time though, I had a great time with my team in the shop and in the CAD labs and the LATE nights we spent working at the end. It is always good to have someone there to help you make something you might not be comfortable making or getting approval of a design that could work better.
Time management started out great. We had a schedule and said we would stick to it no matter what. Well that didn’t last very long. We were soon behind schedule and im still not sure when that happened. Time in the shop just seemed to go by faster than we could manufacture anything and soon we were way behind. It also didn’t help that machines were so hard to come by. There were a lot of times we were stuck doing nothing because we could not get on a mill or a lathe. Towards the end we had all our parts manufactured but still had the long and tedious task of assembly. This proved very time consuming and we spent 5 very long days/nights/mornings trying to work out all the numerous little snags along the way. It all ended up working in the end and we finished on time. It would have been nice to have a few extra days to work but our machine turned out AWESOME.
Overall this was by far my favorite class so far at U of M. I had a lot of fun making the Slotbot and although I am upset our machine didn’t work as well as we hoped due to crappy plastic bevel gears. I am extremely proud of what we built. The only thing I would change about the class is possibly open the shop a few days earlier and make more machines available to use. I also think that the GSI’s should build a Slotbot to compete. This way I could see what an older more experienced graduate student would have built. I feel that would have been a great learning aid.
-Steve
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