Week 1: Beginning and Introduction

I begin with the Spartan Speedway project this week as part of the 1/12 scale track manufacturing/process development team! 

I have helped my dad fix or build things in the backyard since I was young, using mainly hand tools. The degree of error that could be tolerated for what we were doing was fairly large. One of the projects that I worked on when I was a kid included helping to rebuild a fence with wood boards, metal brackets, nails, and a hammer. As you can imagine, the nails could be located almost anywhere, meaning that precision and tolerance played almost no role at all.

Later on, I began to work on project that required more precision, such as soldering. When working with a circuit board for the first time, I was careful, but not careful enough. I didn’t pay enough attention to the iron and melted a previous solder joint to bridge two pins, creating a short in the board and frying a component. This was one of the many cases where I learned that precision is important and necessary to help create something to work exactly as planned.

During middle school, I was a member of the school robots team, and was responsible for ensuring that our robot was programmed to run well to complete the predetermined actions and courses for the inter-school competition. I quickly found that the team responsible for physically building the robot did not pay much attention to precision, as some of the components that they used for one side of the robot did not match the capabilities of the components used on the other side. The asymmetrical performance of the different components made it much harder to get the robot to perform all tasks as well as it might have been able to.

In high school, I helped create 3-D models as part of yet another inter-school competition. I was able to use a laser cutter for the first time, which I assumed would help with many of the precision issues that I had seen before. However, my calculations and rounding of numbers worked against me, as the scale to which I was building the model did not allow for assumptions as large as I had made. This lack of precision resulted in an abundance of extra work and time, which yet again showed me the necessity to work carefully when creating something, especially where precision is paramount.

Having learned from experiences such as these and many more, I intend to work carefully and precisely in order to aid the repeatability and reliability of the means to fabricate necessary parts for the project.

—Kevin Yoshihara