Final Reflection: Yagiz Yildiz

I can say that this class was a really different and learning experience for me. I had a great experience about working as a team and designing something from the beginning. Even though I am not going to be a Mechanical Engineer and I took this class as a Technical Elective, I liked it a lot. I think, thanks to ME 250 I got an insight about design and manufacturing process, which will definitely make me a better engineer.

The most important thing I learned from this class is that having correct measurements is the most important thing in a design. If the different parts that you manufactured don’t fit each other you won’t have a fully functioning machine. Having correct measurements and perfect parts that fits each other depends on the preparations you made before the manufacturing process.  Now that we got our grades from the machines, I can admit that some of the parts we manufactured had slightly wrong dimensions, fortunately we figured the problems out and made them fit each other but at the end of the day we understood that for our next design we should be a lot more careful while dimensioning different parts.

The other thing I can talk about is scheduling and timing. While working as a team, you cannot always find a time that works for each member and this eventually slows the team down. If your team can’t manage its time carefully you will end up with last minute actions. Hopefully, we didn’t have a major scheduling or timing problems but I can say that we could have done even better.

Working as a team is important because in this way you can divide the job among the members and this makes everything easier if everybody does his or her part in time. Also, each person has his or her different ideas and point of view that is why by teamwork you can always arrive to a better solution in shorter time.

Also, I should say that I have never used a lathe or mill in my life before I absolutely enjoyed learning and using it.  By using the machines on my own and seeing problems that can be faced during process, I understood the importance of having a simple and clean design. Sometimes you design a product without think about the manufacturing process. Thanks to this class, I’ll always have some basic idea about the feasibility of the product.

In additions, driving the machine that I contributed to design and manufacture, was so much fun and priceless. See you product in real life and seeing how that products interacts with the environment taught me a lot about the design and manufacturing process.

In opinion, one thing that needs to be changed in this class is the schedule. I think teams need more time for MS8, MS9 and MS10. We spent decent amount of time for planning and designing but we didn’t have enough time to manufacture our machine properly. We were always in a rush and we had hard times solving the problems we encountered during the manufacturing process.

Other than that, GSIs and teachers were extremely helpful about everything.  I think lectures were really interesting and they actually taught a lot about the design process.