During the summer of 2024, I worked/ interned for the owner of a propulsion and technologies company.  They are a propeller manufacturing company with their own unique propellers and they also make propellers for many different companies.  Some of the bigger names being Suzuki, Gatortail, Mercury, Honda, and many more.

When I first arrived I took control of the quality control for a major line of propellers containing about 97 unique designs of propellers.  My most significant unique contribution to this role was designing, proposing, and implementing a different way to check the center bore dimensions of propellers.  Before I arrived employees were taught to check each center bore dimension with calipers and compare those numbers to a proprietary table of acceptable value ranges. Doing this would take anywhere from 45 seconds to 2 minutes depending on how proficient the employee was as well as confirming values over and over making sure nothing was overlooked.  I saw this process was challenging for some employees and took too long considering there are about 1,000,000 of these propellers currently in service around the world.  My solution to this is making a set of gauges and if the gauge fits snugly between different marks on the gauge then all the dimensions are within the acceptable range.  If the values were not in the acceptable range we would immediately know if the propeller needs to have material added or taken away via broaching.  This change to the quality control line brought this test down from an average of 75 seconds to 2 seconds.  When applied to a million propellers this would have saved more than 2 years of man hours in one fell swoop.  Additionally I wrote standard operating procedures for every machine on the site so that if someone was not able to work anyone could run a machine.

After this was under my belt I started focusing almost all my time on bringing new ideas and innovation to the company.  Lots of different thoughts and ideas later I proposed a plan to start implementing robots to the owner and it was approved.  I chose a Yaskawa MotoMan GP50 to do testing on because its maximum load was three times heavier than the heaviest propeller this company manufactured. Additionally, there were safety features and other robots I would be able to integrate in with this robot.  Once I set up a testing space and had the robot working I designed many different toolings to attach to the robot after being 3D printed until a final decision was made for the best attachments.  After this I made a couple programs for the robot to show off its capabilities and roughly show how it would be implemented to the owner.

Along the way some things I learned at this internship additionally are driving a forklift and scissor lift, tig welding, stick welding, 3d printing, laser etching, cnc milling, cnc drill press, pull and push broaching, 3d scanning, laser topography mapping, large pin mill machines, cad modeling programs other than solidworks, machining and fabrication techniques, communicating with foundries owned by this company in China and Mexico, and managing/ conducting a large project safely in a industrial facility.