My Projects

This page goes over some of my personal projects. As you know, I really love engineering, and I spend a lot of my time designing and producing fun little projects. I spend my time making these just because I like the design process, and manufacturing. I love 3D printers and laser engravers, and I hate to say it, but I also love making mistakes. Learning from mistakes is one of the best ways to learn in my opinion, and it's fantastic when you use your own mistakes to change the obvious flaws in your design that you didn't see before.

There's plenty of projects that I've made outside of school that I'd love to talk about! I just had to pick my favorites. I have tons of ideas, but I can only work on so much at a time. I'm currently designing a rocket that I can fly for my Tripoli L1 certification! However, I didn't put it on here because it's still in the design phase. Feel free to ask me anything about any of the current projects I'm working on!

Motorcycle Mechanic

In the Fall of 2024, my parents finally let me take the motorcycle up to Boulder! In October however, the motorcycle did not start anymore. I was deeply sadened because of the effort it takes just to get the motorcycle up to Boulder. Of course, I could hire a mechanic, and order a tow truck to take the motorcycle to the shop.... but let's not forget I'm a college student with low funds.

Determining the Problem

Determined , I set off to solve the problem in with minimal monetary investment. First task is to figure out what is wrong, and how we can fix it. The lights and dials light up with the key open, and the starter motor operates just fine. So it can't be the battery. Puzzled, I broke the problem down. What are the 3 things needed for combustion? Fuel, oxygen, an ignition source, and (in the case of an internal compression engine) compression. Recently, a friend's car stopped functioning to bad gas. Hmmmm I thought, "This motorcycle has been sitting in a garage for a few years, and is very rarely fueled up due to the insane as mileage". Aha! It's bad gas. I quickly drained the tank with a hose, and filled it up with premium gas. She started up right away!

Problem Solved! Right?

Well no..... it turns out that the next day, the bike didn't start again :( This time with the same symptoms. Well, I must've gotten lucky then. If it wasn't the fuel, then it must be either the ignition source, or the compression. I silently quivered at the thought of having troubles with compression. If the head gaskets or piston seals are shot, I might as well buy a new motorcycle.

While researching what the problem could be, I noticed in a lot of videos that my motorcycle sounded differently when opening the key. When the key is opened to the on position, the fuel pump creates a whirring sound priming the engine for startup. Mine however would create a weird clicking noise. With a little more research, I realized that this is likely the problem. My fuel pump does not function anymore, and cannot deliver fuel to the engine. What else could possibly cause that weird noise? And that could explain why the motorcycle worked again, but not the following day.

(Sorry the captions are so small. There's no settings for font size with this feature)

My lovely Honda CBR 250

Solution

I quickly scrambled to find a new fuel pump. With it being October now, the end of the motorcycle season was nearing. With none to be found at local shops, I was forced to look online. Luckily, Honda provides all stock parts, and I found the pump! Horray! One small issue. For some unknown and ridiculous reason, Honda was charging $550 for the tiny pump. Really? It's an injection molded piece of plastic with a small electric motor. No matter what industry you work for, supply chain is always a pain. Luckily, I found the same pump on Amazon for $50. You can guess which one I purchased.

Along with the fuel pump, I ordered a new sparkplug, fuel filter, and air filter. If I was going to disassemble the entire motorcycle, I might as well do maintenance on as much as possible.

Lessons Learned

Throughout this labor-intensive project, I learned a LOT about internal combustion engines. I already had a good idea of how they worked, but I really needed to apply it here to figure out the problem, how to fix it, and fix all the problems that came up along the way. Below are some mistakes/lessons learned along the way that I'll be careful not to do again!

Overtorquing the spark plug - (Image 2)
In the second image on the left here, you can see near the bottom of the threads that I wrecked it. Luckily, engineers are smart, and they designed the spark plug to be weaker than the engine. Imagine how horrible it would be that the threads on the engine block stripped. I would be done for.
Dropping tools - (Image 3)
Yep. I dropped a phillips head into the motorcycle. I spent at least 20 minutes looking for it and never found it. Let's just hope this doesn't cause problems down the road
Seals have orientations!
When installing the fuel pump, I replaced the gasket, but did not rotate it to match a pattern on the pump. This ended in disaster when the 1/2 gallon of gasoline I poured into the tank proceeded to leak all over the motorcycle and garage floor. To say the least, this was very dangerous as a single spark could send the whole house up in flames. Luckily, gasoline evaporates kind of quickly. Unfortunately, the stench of gasoline does not which made the roommates very unhappy.
Patience
When removing the body panels, I was losing my mind. There's tons of tiny little clips everywhere holding the body panels together. I broke a lot of these. It could be because the motorcycle is nearly 2 decades old, or maybe I just need to be more patient.

Micro Liquid Rocket Engine

Very rough sketch of injector assembly

The design is currently in a very preliminary stage as I decided to start this project at the start of October, and I will update this page as I make more progress. For now, these pictures are all I have for the project as well as some notes with rough calculations. However, I am hoping to have a cold-flow water test of the preliminary injector plate by Thanksgiving.

Project Fireball

Project Fireball is my attempt at making an ultra-simplistic liquid rocket engine. The engine is designed to run on off-the-shelf 91% isopropyl alcohol and compressed air. The goal of this project is to learn the process of designing a rocket engine, and gain experience with fluid systems. I want to learn the calculations that go into sizing orifices, flow rates, oxidizer-fuel ratios, nozzle geometry, and everything else! With this project I'll also learn more about selecting valves and I'll gain a lot more experience with machining.

Since liquid oxidizers are expensive, I'd like to try and just use compressed air. The idea is to use an impinging injector, and have the alcohol atomized by a stream of air rather than a liquid oxidizer. Since I'm not sure that this idea will work, I will be resin printing an injector with just one orifice for both, and I'll run a cold-flow water test to see if the results are favorable.

Lastly, I don't have access to a fancy metal 3D printer, so it is very likely that this will only work if the injector plate is resin printed. The goal is to design an injector that can sustain a 2-3 second burn, which I think is very plausible. Unfortunately this means that each injector plate will only be able to hot-fire once.

Incomplete CAD for injector plate

Homemade Rocket Motors

One of my more dangerous projects..... I decided it would be fun and educational to design and build my own rocket motors. I used the infamous sugar rocket recipe to mix my own fuel, and attempted to make my rocket motors as inexpensive as possible. The most accessible materials to me were PVC and 3D printing. I designed rocket motors with a PVC housing, and a 3D printed retainer. The nozzle being just a metal ring with a hole drilled in it. The 3D printed retainer held the metal "nozzle" in place, and was epoxied to the body. These nozzle held exceptionally well when the propellant burned properly. Shown in the images below, testing didn't always go to plan. There were a lot of failures, and a lot to be learned from designing rocket motors from scratch.

In order to validate my designs and test for adequate thrust, a kitchen scale was used as a "load cell" to measure the thrust of the rocket. It can be seen in the bottom left picture. Note that the other two pictures from SN4, and R.H.I.N.O. do not have a kitchen scale. This is because the "load cell" was unfortunately destroyed in a fiery explosion on the third static fire attempt.

This project was by far the most fun! Static fire nights were always the highlight of the week, and it was very exciting to see how the next version would fail to see how the design could be improved.

A proper burn on SN4: The 6th rocket motor iteration

R.H.I.N.O. Static Fire Incident: Nozzle Failure

Version 1 Explosion: Bulkhead Failure

Liquid-Cooled 3D-Printable Rocket Nozzle

In tandem with the homemade rocket motors, I wanted to make a nozzle that was reusable, and had a proper expansion ratio. The aluminum disk with a hole cut out worked decently well, but I wanted to see mach diamonds out of the little rocket motors. I started designing a liquid cooled 3D-printable nozzle. Since the nozzle would be 3D printed, it would most definitely melt during a static fire. The idea was to cool the nozzle using water to extend the life of the nozzle so that it could survive at least one static fire. This design of course would not be able to fly because of its size, however I thought it was a fun idea to give a shot at and test.

Side view of the assembly

Section view of the assembly

I'd start out by running ice cold water for several minutes through the system. This would cool the nozzle before the static fire to further increase its lifetime a little more. The nozzle assembly would attach to the PVC using typical PVC bonding adhesives. This would fuse the 3D printed part and the PVC to be one piece.

Electric Wheelchair

For our freshman projects course (GEEN 1400), our team decided it would be a great idea to design an affordable electric wheelchair. We looked online, and every electric wheelchair out there on the market is extremely expensive ranging from $2,000 up to $15,000! Our team's goal was to make a product that could be 3D printed at home, and could turn any wheelchair into an electric wheelchair. An inexpensive kit would be bought including 2 motors, a battery, and an electronics housing to control the motors. The remaining parts could be 3D printed at home and assembled onto any wheelchair. The result would be an electric wheelchair with similar technical specs as the other wheelchairs on the market, for a fraction of the price.

Our team worked long hours designing and testing dozens of designs. Components ranging from sprockets, to electronics housing, to motor mounts, our team ended up printing over 50 components! The result was a wheelchair with a top speed of 8 miles per hour, and a range of just about 5 miles. Unfortunately, due to the nature of PLA plastic and the limitations of 3D printing, the lifespan of this wheelchair kit was not very long. The team experienced several setbacks with the motor mounts. Designing the motor mounts was the most difficult part of the entire project as the plastic mounts had to endure hundreds of pounds of force. The team went through 10+ iterations of the motor mounts in an attempt to make them strong enough to handle the extreme loading conditions.

Close up CAD of the drive assembly

Motor testing of the 3D printed model

Ultimately, our design had a lot of flaws that needed to be ironed out in order to have a working product. The electronics box was very raw and not well integrated. This was mostly because the team needed access to the electronics very frequently throughout the prototyping process. The motor mounts as well needed to be much stronger than what they were, and the fasteners could be more robust. After all of the hard work however, it was wonderful to see an idea go from the computer, into real life. I love seeing concepts turned into physical components, and tested to failure to find the physical limitations of the design. I had tons of fun with this project, and I would love to revisit the project in the future with a larger budget and more time to further develop the design.

Subsonic PVC Canon

Amidst the pandemic, I found myself bored inside of the dorm room a lot. I decided it would be a lot of fun to design a PVC canon that could launch projectiles at Mach 0.5. This canon used the principles of vacuum pressure to achieve such high velocities. A 12ft PVC pipe was used as the main chamber, and a smaller PVC pipe ran inside of the larger pipe as a piston. The canon was basically a large syringe. The front end of the canon was covered with aluminum foil, and the piston was pulled backwards. When the piston was pulled backwards, a vacuum was pulled in the chamber because of the increase in volume, and when the piston made it out the other end of the chamber, air was allowed to rush in at the speed of sound. This pressure would then push the projectile forward and accelerate it to ridiculous speeds. The speed of the projectiles was calculated using a rented highspeed camera and LoggerPro. In order to fire the canon, a team of at least 3 was necessary, but usually a group of 5-6 people helped hold the canon.

This project was extremely exciting because the entire project budget was under $20. The entire assembly consisted of only two PVC pipes that were $17 at the McGuckin's Hardware store, a 95 cent endcap, a $1.20 O-ring, and finally some PVC cement and electrical tape.

Indoor Preliminary testing of the canon.

Home Made Volume Dial

Final Assembly

Exploded View

This is a volume dial that I've designed. It will use an Arduino Micro and a rotary encoder to change the volume on my PC. I've designed it to be very aesthetic, having a walnut wooden base, with an acrylic spacer between the base and the dial. The dial is to be made out of aluminum to have a shiny silver finish. The heavy dial will have a smooth and satisfying operation. Inside of the volume dial, there is a set of RGB led's to shine through the acrylic ring. This gives my desk a pop of color, and makes listening to music more exciting!

These types of projects are so much fun because the end result is something that looks stunning, and serves a legit purpose in everyday life. I also really enjoy this type of project because it takes a little bit of creativity to come up with these ideas. The LED ring can be found online for $8. The acrylic can be taken from the scraps in the ITLL, and the walnut can be taken also from the scraps of a woodworking shop. The top aluminum dial can also be taken as scraps from any workshop. Really the only things that will need to be bought are the Arduino and the rotary encoder. The Arduino is $20 online, and the rotary encoder is about $7 for a pack of 5 of them. A very cheap but fun project!

CO2 Dragster

A couple of friends and I took this competition above and beyond. We spent months working on this event, and we redefined what a CO2 dragster is. Our Castle View team swept the board on the districts and the state competition taking home first, second, and third at both competitions. We did this by simply spending an absurd amount of time on every aspect of the car. During the design phase, we put our cars through countless flow simulations to test their aerodynamics, and we collaborated to contribute ideas to each other. Before CNC milling out the cars, we each went through all the wood blocks at the school and chose the lightest. Surprisingly, balsa wood is very inconsistent with its weight. Some blocks would weigh up to 350 grams, while others were as low as 100 grams.

Rear Wheel Assembly

This project is my absolute favorite. This project was apart of one of the engineering competitions that I took place in at Castle View. The idea of this event is to make the fastest car. These cars have a CO2 cartridge placed in the back of the car, and a launcher pokes a hole in the cartridge to release the compressed air. This results in the car flying forward down a 75ft track. This competition is very hard because of the amount of restrictions on the design of the vehicle. Violating one of the restrictions will result in an automatic disqualification. At one of the competitions, only 5 of the 27 cars that competed were allowed to race because of the disqualifications.

Side View

We figured out that weight was 95% of the competition, and so each of our cars was within a gram of the lowest weight limit. Every single part of the car was engineered to be as light as possible. We ordered bearings online that each cost $10. These bearings had almost no friction, and spun for a long time. To save on weight for the axles, we didn't use the metal ones that the school provided, but rather ordered carbon fiber axles. These saved a lot of weight. Finally, we designed our wheels to as light as they could. They were so thin that they were fragile. One of our teammates had the genius idea of laser cutting out his wheels. This made 3D printing them not a problem, and they were super light. We later found out at the districts competition that this didn't work out since the wheels would shatter during the races.

These races were extremely competitive. The fast cars typically finished within just a thousandth of a second. One way we were able to lose just a little bit of time was by putting a little fin at the front of the car. The race was finished by crossing a laser at the end, and this fin would cross the laser before the rounded edge of the car would so it would finish faster. In the end, designing these cars was an absolute blast, and it was a huge learning experience for all of us.

I just want to point out the wheels. I spent months developing these, and developing a method to manufacture these. These wheels were probably the lightest wheels at the competition. Believe it or not, I almost burned down my house manufacturing a pair of these while trying to use acetone to "vaporsmooth" the ABS.

Laser Engraved Pencil

This awesome NASA pen is from practicing engraving on pens. The laser evaporated the silver paint over the ink cartridge, and the pencil is now see-through which is really cool.

This is one of my best looking projects. I engraved my name into my own pencil. I think it looks absolutely stunning, and it's gorgeous. It took me a while to do this because I knew that I only had one shot to make it right. If I messed up the engrave, then it would ruin the pencil. I spent about a week finding ways to engrave objects with outstanding precision. I ended up making a CAD model of the pencil, and converting the file to a DXF. A DXF file is something that the laser engraving program reads as a drawing. It uses it to cut/engrave. Using that DXF file, I then cut a mold of the pencil to press fit it into a piece of wood that would then hold it in place so that it wouldn't move.

I practiced engraving tons of pens and pencils before I even thought of engraving my special edition red GraphGear 1000. Finally, I felt confident enough to go for it. This pencil costs $20, so I couldn't mess it up. Luckily, I had mastered engraving pens and pencils with incredible accuracy, and I knew it would turn out perfectly, and perfectly it did.

I know it might seem silly to some that I paid $20 for a pencil and engraved it, but I think it's fantastic. We all use pencils daily, so why not make it something enjoyable? Writing with this pencil is a dream, and having a custom engraving on it makes it just one more thing to look forward to during the day.

If you want one of these custom pens or pencils, let me know! Find me on the "Contact" page!

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