Individual Refections: Sean Hazaray

ME 250 experience has been unlike any other class I have taken at the University so far. I have never felt so proud when we placed our bot onto the arena that Thursday afternoon. After the countless hours of work from the design to the manufacturing process, I am confident that the skills I developed in ME 250 will carry over after I graduated. It was a unique experience to see our designs that we hand sketched slowly develop into a CAD model, and eventually into an actual slotbot. I was especially nervous about the manufacturing aspect of the class, especially due to my lack of experience with tools such as the lathe and the mill. However, I can proudly reflect that from the informative workshops and the experience in the ME 250 shop, I have become a much more efficient machinist and a smarter engineer.

My favorite part of the class was the design aspect. At first, I struggled to understand the commands of Solid Works. However, the labs and the assignment, designing parts became much more easier. One of the most interesting parts about Solid Works was being able to create a movie using Motion Study in Solid Works. It took hours to figure out, but in the end, was well worth the hard work, and I think helped clarify our design in the Design Review.

From this class, we saw how hard work pays off, and how every detail counts. We learned importance of accurate tolerances. At the beginning, we decided to take the “easy” way and use the drill press rather than the mill. Because of this, our parts didn’t accurately reflect what was in our drawings, and were unusable. From that point on, we realized that we would have to analyze every detail in order to perfect our parts.

I suppose the biggest struggles for our group was trying to balance the project between all of our schedules. In addition, our first few meetings were very inefficient. However, we learned over time that we were no longer four individuals, but rather one team. Overall, we were a balanced team and each of us was comfortable with doing anything from providing the tolerances in the Solid Works drawings to manufacturing a part.

Overall, this class was very interesting but I believe that there can be a few improvements to better the students for next term. I felt the exam was a poor reflection of the material presented in class. I also think that the professors and GSIs could have been more informative about what they were looking for in the assignments and milestones. I didn’t understand how the points were distributed for some of the milestones. I think that a more detailed explanation of what the GSI’s were looking for would be very helpful to future students.

I also feel that there are a few machines in the machine shop that I did not have effective training on. I would recommend that every student gets adequate training for both, the mill and the lathe as both machines are instrumental for a solid performance in every Design and Manufacturing class. I think training on the lathe and the mill would have helped my performance considerably in this class.

Overall, I am really proud of how my team worked together throughout the term. We came over some adversity, but we learned from each other, and more importantly, we learned from our mistakes.