Engineering Equipment Testing
Background
In my engineering classes we had various opportunities to work with interesting pieces of machinery. We were given access to a manual mill and manual lathe for certain classes which we used to machine small hammers from brass and aluminum as well as a few other fabrication projects. While prototyping designs for water pumps, we once again had access to the lathe and mill as well as a CNC router which my team used to form the housing of our pump from thick acrylic sheet stock.
My material science lab allowed students to set up a tensile force testing machine to test the failure mode, stress and strain of different alloys of aluminum. Later we used a Rockwell hardness tester to determine the hardness of those same alloys on the Rockwell scale. More memorably, in my control systems lab, we were divided into teams and instructed to generate a set of instructions to be repeated by a Kuka arm robot. This was our final project during my last semester at the university and I’m glad to have been exposed to that kind of technology and learn its applications in the world of precision manufacturing. Wind tunnels, thermocouples, precision power supplies and oscilloscopes are the most memorable and exciting among the countless other instruments that we operated in my engineering classes. I have since begun acquiring some such tools for my own use in my hobby projects after having learned how useful they can be.