Gear Box

12/9/2020

This design problem asked to one of my 2nd Year Mechanical Engineering Design teams was to create a gearbox that can achieve at least a 12:1 speed reduction ratio from its input to its output shaft for 3D printing and assembly.

This project took a good amount of collective critical thinking in selecting out of the mechanisms we know of, which would be the best to meet the primary and secondary functions of facilitating speed reduction and supporting the gear train. Due to the complexity of this project, distributing the workload in this team design setting greatly reduced the amount of time it would have taken to complete if only one of us worked on it.

A project like this was the perfect introduction to bring a concept to life. Even though it was done remotely, our teaching assistant 3D printed the parts of the gearbox we created and everything meshed properly! Similar to manufacturing, ideas are being brought into fruition constantly and with the lessons learned from working on this gearbox, it not only reinforced my aspirations to study manufacturing, but also put me in a better position to contribute to a design team later on.