Hayley Hunter
Final Reflection
While during the class I found ME 250 to be very stressful, now
that it’s over I found it to be a very interesting class. I liked how we, as a
team, developed a strategy, came up with design concepts, then a final design, and
then we got to see it all come together as our finished product. I felt like
this class was really useful because I can see how everything we learned can be
applicable to us in real life as mechanical engineers.
Our team functioned pretty well together. We all had different strengths that allowed
each of us to excel in certain areas where others weren’t as familiar. I think
our main problem was not checking each other’s work. After a long day of
working in the machine shop, it was not a good idea to continue working on our
project and try to figure out more measurements and calculations, which is what
was often the case. This led to our main problem: hole placement for our
brackets were off. Usually, the hole was only slightly off so we solved this
issue by drilling the hole a little larger knowing the bolt head would hide the
slightly larger hole. We had to do this a number of times though and it got to
be frustrating but we fixed our mistakes and our robot turned out just fine.
The biggest challenge I had with this class was the lack of
experience and prior knowledge. While I have always been a real hands-on type
person, I had never worked with any of these machines so being asked to use
them was a bit of a challenge at first. Once we had training and I got used to
the machines, I felt more confident and was able to use the machines. I felt
like our team was at a disadvantage because of this though. None of us had had
any prior experience on these machines so we had a bit of a slower start
whereas many other teams had prior experience that gave them a good start to
machining. Even though I didn’t have a lot of experience at first, Bob and Mark
were really helpful and helped our team out a lot along the way, including
doing all the welding on our robot for us.
One critique I have for this class was the lectures. I didn’t
really see how they tied into our projects because a lot of the material seemed
to be more complex than was necessary for this class. It would have been more
useful to have more lecture slides that were directly related to how our robot
would work and how it would be put together, in particular the gear boxes and
motors and how to attach them to our robot. Since our group didn’t have much
expertise in the assembly of our drive train, we looked at the lectures slides
to figure out how we should assemble our double gear box to drive our robot.
The lecture slides suggested we use a flexible tubing to attach two axles so
that is what we did. We ended up having issues when the time came to test our
robot; the tubing was getting in the way and our gears wouldn’t turn so our
robot couldn’t move. We noticed a lot of teams didn’t use the flexible tubing
and just had one long axle which didn’t seem to give them any problems. Had we
known that just making one long axle would be a good option, we would have done
it but instead we followed the lecture slides which ended up giving us issues.
Overall, this class was stressful and a lot of work but it
was really rewarding to see our finished product racing around on the table.
This has been my favorite class so far because it allowed us to take something
from the design stage to the completed final product, which will be very useful
in future classes and in the real world.
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