Jeff Plott's Individual Reflection

I learned and improved many skills involved in both design and manufacturing.
One important thing I learned is how to find out the properties of different materials and what each property means in terms of how it can be implemented in a design.

Another thing I learned is the different types of fits that can be used in a design such as a clearance fit, transition fit or an interference fit. I also learned the manufacturing processes that should be used to achieve the desired fit while maintaining the desired tolerance. For example, when I was manufacturing the pillow blocks for the car, I had to drill the holes to a very tight tolerance to create a press fit for the bushings to be fit into. To do this I used the mill and first drilled a center hole. Next I drilled a hole using a drill bit that was slightly smaller than the desired hole size. Finally, I used a reamer to ream the hole to the precise dimension needed.

ME250 also improved some of my skills that I had learned in earlier classes. Before entering ME250, I had previous experience in using the CAD program Solid Edge. Because of this, I already had a sense of how to create parts, assemblies, and drawings. I found that Solid Works was very similar to Solid Edge and thus allowed me to practice and improve upon the skills I already had.

This course also improved my teamwork skills. Due to the open-ended nature of the design problem, there were many different strategies and concepts that could be implemented. Therefore, each team member had their own views on what we should create for our machine at each step in the process. Because of this, I became better at seeing and understanding other’s ideas and also critiquing/combining several different ideas to create and even better design. I also became better at conveying my ideas to others by use of explanations and drawings.

Before this course I already had fairly decent time management skills. This course simply reiterated to me the importance of proper time management. A large part of our team’s success was due to these time management skills. Because we managed our time properly, we were able to finish the majority of our robot with a couple days to spare. This provided us with crucial testing time which allowed us to encounter problems we did not previously envision while still having time to correct these problems. One thing we did not expect was the large deflection on our planetary gearbox shaft caused by the great amount of torque needed to propel our Velcro covered wheels. If we did not allow ourselves ample time to test our machine, we would not have had time to manufacture another pillow block to fit on the end of the motor shaft to eliminate this deflection. This would have caused our planetary gearbox to fail prematurely thus rendering our machine immobile. We also found that the gears and conveyor belt wheels that were held on with epoxy were spinning on their shafts. We were able to remedy this by drilling holes and inserting set screws through the gears and into the shaft.

An area where this course could have used improvement was with the homework assignments. I felt that the requirements of needed detail in the first homework should have been more clearly stated. Also, the requirements for the FRDPARRC tables were unclear in the begging with the necessary detail needed in each step. Also, the detail of the peer review comments on the first few milestones was also unclear. For example, I got full credit for the comments on the MS where we had to come up with three strategies with no remarks from Sei Jin stating that in the future I needed to ask for more detailed comments. However, on the next milestone I had the exact same length/quality of comments on my concepts as I did for my strategies but was marked off 5 points for comments other people wrote on my concepts. I felt that this was unfair due to the fact that no specific detail level was ever stated by Sei Jin and there was no warning after the first assignment was graded that I needed to ask for more detailed comments.

I could have improved my performance in this course if I would have included I greater level of detail in my first couple assignments. However, I feel that I would have done so if the requirements were more clearly stated as I discussed in the previous paragraph.