Project Summary
As a group we feel the project has been successful. If we were to carry out the same task again, we all agree that we would do nothing different. The crane itself was designed and tested very well. The group had a very wide variety of skills, the design engineers were very confident with CAD, and the mechanical engineers were very confident with the stress analysis. As a group we worked very well together from the beginning stages to the very end of the project. We set deadlines and met them almost perfectly every week, and with sometimes up to three meetings a week we were getting through the work at a very good rate. We as a group feel we could not have had a better group to work with.
During the duration of the project we faced some challenges. The hardest were probably the choice of material and the stress analysis. We had to change material a few times after stress analysis so the crane itself would not fail under stress. The choice of the design was also a difficult phase, we had a lot of different designs and different crane styles to choose from. Choosing the right one was a vital stage in the development of our crane, a bad choice would ultimately have led to a bad project.
Our final design was a very good design and we felt it was the best it could be, it was engineered to a safety factor of 1.5 and very different to most the other designs we saw. We felt a lot of the designs we saw had many more flaws than our own.
To summarise, the group was very happy with the whole project and the final design. We all feel that given the chance again we would not change anything and would carry out the task in the same way.
