mechanical & electrical team member

responsibilities

• design and revise mechanical parts in solidworks to meet competition rules and inspection.
• validate designs with fea before anything gets cut or welded.

what i accomplished

• redesigned the jacking bar after last year's was too heavy and poorly made - a steel tube with scooped cutouts to shed weight, validated in solidworks simulation at a minimum factor of safety of about 2.0.
• caught a clearance problem: the differential hangers were hitting the jacking bar because the mounting tabs didn't give enough clearance, so i redesigned the tabs to be a bit longer and differently shaped.
• found the minimum-safety-factor hotspot at a sharp cutout edge and some edges that were too thin and would break, and filleted those edges to spread the stress.
• built it by hand when machining wasn't an option: drawing → printed stencil wrapped on the tube → angle grinder → welded-on tabs.

professional growth

formula sae is where i learned that a design isn't done when it looks right - it's done when it can be built with the tools you actually have and survive the car. the jacking bar taught me design for manufacturing, stress concentration, and how to read an fea factor-of-safety plot critically instead of just checking the peak number.

teamwork & responsibility

a whole team building one car means your part has to interface with everyone else's. i learned to document decisions, hand off cleanly, and work to a shared deadline where one late part blocks everyone.