Every senior in the mechanical engineering program here at BYU participates in the Capstone program. Basically, we are put into groups of four or five students and assigned a project to work on. The projects come from different companies around the world. Most of them are in Utah, but they there are projects for a companies in Europe and Africa as well.
My particular project is for a company called Varian Medical Systems. Here in Utah they produce X-Ray tubes for medical devices and security systems like those at airports. One of the steps in their procedure is to remove material through milling on a part of the X-Ray tube and that creates little metal chips. Our project is to come up with a vacuum system to remove all of those chips. So we named our team the Super Suckers, as you can see in the logo above. Our team gets along really well together, which is good because we spend at least two hours everyday working on this project and it will last all year long. It is going to be a very time consuming project, but so far it has been a lot of fun. It really helps to have team members that are willing to work together and who don't mind goofing around a little as well.
Before we started working on the project for Varian there was a competition between all the teams to build a mousetrap car that would drop a nickel at a designated distance. We had just a couple days to design, build and test it. The picture and video below show what we came up with.
Team Super Suckers Mousetrap CarI know the video isn't too amazing, but it's the best I could do trying to start the car and control the camera all at the same time.
1 comment:
That's awesome! I bet Kent is going to blog about his capstone team now too.
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