Breanna's Blog #1

After much resistance, I have decided to finally begin my blogging for the summer. My blog posts might not seem quite as relevant as other team bloggers, but hopefully they will give a bit of insight into how our team works and functions as both a research group and student group.

Despite majoring in Course 2, before this summer began I lacked the hands on experience that is associated with such a degree – basic shop training. The first thing I want to post about is how I learned to use this equipment.

In the beginning of the summer, Steven Lam a fellow EVTer was designing and constructing an oil sump. In order to build specific sides of this oil sump he needed to use a milling machine. When Steven was working on it, he took me under his tutelage and taught me how to use the milling machine. By the end of this instruction, I knew how to change the mill bits for the various sizes and types of holes needed to cut into this aluminum and understood how the various planes of the mill worked and how they could be used to finish creating a design.

However, this lesson didn’t even begin to cover everything you need to know to use the milling machine. I needed to gain a lot more knowledge and experience before I could use the machine by myself, without being under some supervision. The options were reading a manual, helping my fellow EVTers machine stuff, and/or attending a machining class. Luckily, our team had a shop training class that weekend. After a 3 hour training on the mill machine, I felt comfortable to use a machine basically by myself (of course, I would still need to appeal to one of the senior members on my team to double check my set-up before I began to mill). In addition to this newfound skill, I also had joint ownership on “EVT bling” with Dianna.