[162-182] Unfortunately, we were getting towards the final stages of modeling right when I had to go home because of COVID-19. Basically, what we had done is, I want to say, counting from the first design I was given, I think there were probably one, two, three, maybe four more designs before we landed on the final design. Some of them were my designs, some of them were my co-workers design. But a lot of it was, we sat down together, and we said, “Would this be a good idea? Yes or no, maybe. Let’s try it.”
I made what’s called an involute profile, which is usually the profile of a gear tooth. To do that, it takes some complicated geometry and it’s not something that I could do by hand, it’s not something you can calculate. It took us a while to figure out how to do this because we were basically designing a gear from scratch. A lot of complex curves and faces and we weren’t really sure where to go. It took about two or three weeks to get that figured out. I should add, this wasn’t a priority project, so it didn’t get a lot of time. I had a lot of projects they were giving me and said, “We need this this week.” This is what’s called modularization, so it’s desired to make our lives easier. But after the design, like I said, we were coming close to finishing the modeling. We had figured out, “All right, this model is good. Everything should work the way we wanted it to. Let’s double check a few things and then we can start putting it on a drawing.”
Then once we have a drawing, we send it out to a company that’s going manufacture it for us and send it right to us. Like I said, unfortunately we didn’t get to actually finish it. But the co-worker that I was working with it on, I’m close to and he did tell me, we had a conversation before I left and I told him, I said, “If you guys figure out what you need here and you’re going to finish it, just do it. Don’t wait for me because I don’t know when I’ll be back.” But they did express their thanks with the project. It felt like my input was appreciated and my time.