Skip to main content

Day 2

Today I learned a lot more about organization and documentation. Mark, my program manager, has an excel dashboard program that he uses to easily look up pieces and projects. He can look up jobs by Jedco's part number, the partner's part number, or the part's find number. It gives him back a lot of information about the part including tools used in the process, cost, quote, profit margins, and issues and comments. On one of the parts he was looking it up but none of the information was being brought back. So, in an effort to learn an important skill for engineering jobs and jobs in general, I taught myself Visual Basic, the language behind Excel formulas. At the end of the tutorial I was skimming and after about two hours of reading the code behind Mark's dashboard, I couldn't find any errors so I asked the person who wrote the code about the references and some clarifications about the code just to make sure I was clear on everything. At the end of it all, we realized there was a dash in the tooling number but no dash in the tooling number in another spreadsheet of approximately 500 tooling number references; so, the dashboard program couldn't find the tool because of bad data. This was tedious but paid off greatly and I saw what went into documentation and how important being careful in the boring stuff is.

I also got to work on some cad modeling today of a piece they already had. Tyler, one of the guys who are on the f-119 wall team, wanted me to familiarize myself with Autodesk Illustrator since all I had used was Solidworks. So he gave me a blueprint, the part that had been machined, and calipers to check measurements. I was happy to be doing something I was familiar with and proud of how well I did on it, the piece turned out well and I surpassed expectations.

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 21, 2018 at 1:13 PM

    Off to a great start. If you are able, some photos of the work you are doing or areas of the facility would be great. That will help your reader follow along. Also, be careful with your writing and editing as there are a couple small mistakes in this post. Keep up the great work. I am enjoying this already.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Expectations and Goals

I have known I wanted to be an engineer for a long time. I enjoy problem-solving and have always had excellent spatial reasoning. I began tinkering at a young age with old computers and RC cars. At 11 I ruined one of my RC cars trying to drive it on water. I was still so happy because it skimmed on water for a good three seconds before the frame caught and dragged it down. The only failure was not sealing off the electronics well enough but I was so happy to have done something without a kit or instructions. It was all around fun. I kept going with legos, robots, computer programs, I got to know my way around a wood shop freshmen year and learned about 3d printing and machine guided cutting from CNC machining to laser cutting. As I leave for college I feel completely prepared to tackle any engineering challenge that comes my way. I have a strong base in math and calculus that can only grow in the years to come. And an even stronger base of experience with tinkering and making ...
1 comment
Read more

Day 4

There exists no perfect environment and, as an engineer, it is made my goal to make a perfect environment. I made the first sheet I was working on work. Since I worked out the bugs on that one and improved the functionality I got an explanation of the 5s system and Toyotas Lean engineering philosophy to understand the impact of what I was doing. The Lean system and the 5s system are philosophies that all good engineering companies hold which say the organization of work and the standardization upfront pay off astronomically in the long run. Tyler, who I work with did his thesis on the last company he worked at about implementing Lean engineering, and the impact of it on the company because the company didn't hold the philosophy at all. Tyler determined that the company could save $50,000 a year by organizing workspaces, purchasing tools for each workspace instead of making the production team walking across the plant when they need a new tool on each assembly. Needless ...
1 comment
Read more