Design and Prototyping
As a part of my work on the new pliers and wire cutter product lines, i participated in brainstorming sessions lead by the industrial design department and contributed to discussions around how to solve the specific user needs that our research report had identified. Coming out of that brainstorming session, I was assigned a couple of loose ideas to develop further into concepts and build prototypes for.
Testing and Validating
The other main responsibility I had during this co-op was testing and validating against our benchmarks. In order to do this, I communicated with our partners overseas to plan how many samples we would receive and what tests each sample would go through. I then anylized the results of these tests and lead the discussions around the results with my team before communicating changes to our manufacturing partner. As a part of this validation, I had to build several new jigs to quantify certain functional attributes of the product.
Process Improvement
Because this co-op was in the height of the pandemic, I was one of very few people in the office. As a result of this, I was responsible for operating and maintaining our Stratasys Objet30, HP MJF 5200, and Stratasys Fortus 450MC 3D printers. In maintaining these printers I noticed that the cleaning of the Objet's print bed created a mess as I had to scrape off the cured first layer, then vacuum up the flakes. To make my job easier, I modeled a scraper attachment for the shop vac using my new surface modeling skills to turn this job into one step.
