The first year at RIT a team and I made a trebuchet. It didn’t work, mostly because the 1/4” thick steel eye hook on the pumpkin release mechanism got bent from so much force being directed through it. I have no idea why they trusted first year students to do this without much supervision back in 2019, but they no longer do. I’d like to think watching one of my teammates almost get a concussion and only being saved by a stoppage bar we had taught me the importance of safety mechanisms.

I designed a fixture for pallet dollies after there were safety complaints about them. Happy to say that this resolved the issue. That being said, they only worked well if the dollies were loaded. If I had a chance to go back, I would try and modify the design with either an new head for more grip or for the head to travel more distance to ensure best contact with the floor surface.

This is a scrap impeller from one of my old internships. In my time there I got to analyze the pump curves of a bunch of different models, and in doing so I created some curves to figure out how the material (and by extension, material texture) affected the performance of cast impellers in otherwise identical pumps.

When I still had access to a wind tunnel I got to play around with a lot of designs. In this case, I investigated the impact of nose shape on the static pressure of the surface of the submarine, and tried to see how accurately one could create a modifying model to translate it to water (since a submarine isn’t supposed to fly of course, and if it is then something has either gone very wrong or Anduril is up to something crazy again).

I really like gears. This is an old picture of one of my first 3D printed gearboxes, consisting of a dual phase planetary gearset. These days I don’t make them nearly this big and I probably wouldn’t bother with two phase planetary gears. If there are two phases then the transmission ratio is probably high enough that I could just use a cycloidal gearbox which is much more space efficient, has less backlash, has better internal force distributions… honestly a lot of things.

Granted, this one is more of a hobby. Whenever I get a new desktop I assemble it myself, and this is my third and current one. It uses an MSI Project Zero motherboard to hide the wiring behind the casing and I picked out this case because of its thermal capabilities- its shape effectively creates a “chimney” for heat to rise up and out of the top, which I was fascinated by. I can confirm that it is a very good design thermally speaking.

There was an issue with pump casings where powder coatings exiting the oven ended up being brittle and cracked. I ended up sending a temperature logger through the oven to analyze the issue. The above picture is a rejected casting from the same workplace, although it does have a different issue. In this case the casing was simply undercoated, and since it’s not worth it to sandblast and redo the powder coat for such a high volume item I got to keep it.

I decided to teach myself how to code, so to go about that instead of a simple “Hello World” I just jumped straight into making a whole Chrome Extension. It’s not terribly good, but it does exemplify to my approach with many things- dive straight in. You’ll fail a lot, but failing is how you learn and failing quickly and efficiently is the quickest way to learn a ton.