Things every Mechanical Engineer must know

1. NEVER loan out your copies of: Machinery’s Handbook Shigley’s Mechanical  Engineering Design Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists (okay this one is a shameless plug, but my friend told me it’s “destined to be be a classic of sorts” so you can blame him)

2. Project planning follows the rule of pi. Take how much time you think you can complete something in, multiply it by pi, and that will be the actual length of time it takes.

3. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Don’t give yourself too much time for a project or it will never get done. Speaking of done, check out The Cult of Done Manifesto. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

4. Everything is a spring.

5. If it moves and it shouldn’t, use duct tape. If it doesn’t move and it should, use WD-40.

6. Document everything you do. Someone will ask you to justify your design at some point, and “it kind of sort of looked right” is never a good answer. This is especially true on collaborative projects. The group will forget who did what and it will make going back and changing things that much harder.

7. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

8. Ask questions. If you don’t know something, say so. Your credibility as an engineer lies not in being infinitely intelligent, but in knowing how to get at the right resources to figure it out. If you cheat, people will die.

9. Designing for disassemble is just as important as design for assembly. It will never work the first time you put it together. Oh, and make sure that everywhere there is a screw, there is a place for a screwdriver to install it. And for a hand to fit around said screwdriver.

10. Business will always be a part of engineering. Don’t work for free (unless you really want to) and don’t work without a contract. Don’t design a better mousetrap THEN expect someone to want it. The products that sell the best are not necessarily the ones that are technologically superior.

11. Design is based on requirements. There’s no justification for designing something one bit “better” than the requirements dictate. Better is the enemy of good enough. Get it done then go play outside.

12. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

13. Be friendly and talk to your machinist and/or shop techs. You may have a fancier title or degree, but that does not make you better. A short conversation on how to make a part more easily machinable/moldable/etc. can save thousands of dollars and make you both look good. You may even learn something.

 

Classes every mechanical engineer should take.

The first class is machining, which should be fairly apparent from my title. I think all mechanical engineering students should learn how to machine something. Or, as MEs say, learn how to make chips. There are several reasons for this.

1. Mechanical engineers should be able to build things and know how things are built. In the real world, MEs probably aren’t going to be machining parts 24/7. However, they should know how something is machined and what processes they can use to machine stuff to better design parts/components/systems etc. It also will give MEs an appreciation for good designs that are easily machined.
2. Machining doesn’t require advanced math/physics skills. If students are coming in without AP credit and are following the course schedule, their first two to three semesters are Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Physics I, Physics II, Chem, Writing, etc. For basic machining, you don’t need any of that. A machining course is perfect for a 1st year class because it has no prerequisites. And, it’s not a course that’s time consuming outside of class, relative to the Calcs, Physics, and Chems. So it’s not going to over-burden students.
3. It’s a good class to retain students or even draw students into ME programs. I know most of the first year classes are the so-called weed-out classes. At DrWife’s UG university, they called freshman engineers “pre-business” because so many drop out. While I don’t think fundamentally that everyone should be able to do engineering and people without the math skills even less so, a machining course is a good way to bridge that gap between theory and application. Yes, there’s this advanced calc and physics that can be difficult at times. But, you also get to build cool shit with your own hands. Someone who is on the fence may not hop over because of such a course.
4. Feedback from senior/grad students is that they want/need this in the curriculum to find competitive jobs. Several students I’ve spoken to say they have a competitive disadvantage over other students from other universities because they never had a machining course nor a project that they build with their own hands. They say that trying to describe to your potential future boss that you’re a really good mechanical engineer but you’ve never built anything during your undergraduate program is an oxymoron. If students can see that dilemma, why can’t we, as supposedly advanced educators with higher degrees, see that as well?

So, a machining course in a ME program, makes sense right? How about my second course that every ME should take? Wait for it…

There are some other courses that I think are useful as well. They are:

1. Computer Aided Drafting

(I don’t know how many time I’ve seen this skill listed on job posting. My suggestion is to learn Pro-E, AutoCAD, and SolidWorks. They are the three most widely use and if you can’t use any of these program well, it’ll be difficult to get any ME jobs)

2. Material Selection in Mechanical Design

(highly useful for any design work you’ll be doing in the future)

3. Strength of Materials

(I highly recommend keeping the textbook and notes for this course.)

4. Heat Transfer

(I highly recommend keeping the textbook and notes for this course.)

5. Technical Writing Course

(Very useful, not just for graduate school research papers, but for design or meeting reports for future work).

These courses apply most to design engineering. I might be missing a few courses, but definitely should make a note of these.

 

I will also  recommend the following in order of importance..

1. Experience with prototyping in lathe machine, at least the knowledge of the process flow. Most important because modeling in software is easy, not making it in real life.

2. Software for solid modeling - Solidworks (easy to learn, lots of tutorials available)

3. Good knowledge of basic mechanics, strength of materials or fluid mechanics and mechanism design.

4. Presentation skills - Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint, Word, LaTeX

5. FEM or CFD and software - Ansys/Abaqus/Comsol

6. Numerical methods with Programming - MATLAB/C++/Mathematica/Python