Team

Hi, I'm Brooke! I'm graduating with my M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and obtaining the Mechanical Design and Product Development certification from CU Boulder Spring 2026. I will be starting work at Kelvin Thermal Technologies as a Thermal Engineer after graduation. 

I have a passion for problem solving and the thrill of cutting edge innovation. I thrive in fast-paced, collaborative teams pushing the limits. Prototyping, analysis, DOE, and process development strengths. High power cooling patent pending. Baja SAE Alumni! Outside of tech, I am a nature lover and kitten foster rehoming over 120 cats/kittens since 2011!

For this project, I took the lead of project management, simulations, and helped with a lot of the fabrication. I was an accelerating force to get pretotypes and prototypes made when others were getting hung up on perfection and iteration too early. I coordinated all of the team work time, and when we needed to fabricate what components by in order to meet deadlines and get user feedback in time to incorporate it. When we really needed to learn from the 2” tubing, I coordinated outside of shop time for us to throw it together with an angle grinder and a garage welder, but this was necessary to take the next steps in the design because we had stalled. For the simulations, I have FEA experience from Baja suspension and was able to run our analysis on various tubing and structure designs to optimize our ergonomics and strength. I also spent ~6 hours doing actual steel fabrication for the various prototypes. 

To fully develop this product, personally I would need more business/entrepreneurial expertise as well as knowledge of mass production for welded components. We would need soil expertise from somewhere, but I would like to take on the manufacturing aspect. 

I’m Arjun Ramachandran, a Creative Technology and Design Masters student pursuing a certificate in Mechanical Design and Product Development. 

For this project, I was able to use my skills as a designer to create concept sketches for many of our pretotypes and prototypes, which helped our users to contextualize concept ideas visually. I was also able to use my experience with human centered design to help incorporate ergonomics early in the design process. During our build phase, I designed the three initial stake tips for the winch stake in Solidworks as well as the improved stake tips with relief. During fabrication, I was able to assist the team with preparation tasks for the steel components as well as stress calculations for the winch stake under load. I also got to develop my field need-finding skills through our user interviews and learned how to incorporate user feedback across multiple stages of the design process.

To take the product successfully to market, I would need to improve my 5 axis CNC skills to fabricate the stake tip from a solid billet. I also would need to learn more about soil engineering to refine the design of the lower half of the winch stake. Having this expertise would allow us to develop a product that can secure into multiple ground types and safely handle loading perpendicular to its axis without risk of dislodging, while also allowing the user to insert and remove the device along its axis with ease.

Hi, I’m David, I am a mechanical engineering master’s student pursuing my Mechanical Design and Product Development Certificate at the University of Colorado Boulder, with a secondary focus on systems engineering. During my time involved with this project, I specialized in many of the engineering tasks related to the development of the Winch Stake. Some of these tasks have included modeling variations of the product in Solidworks at different stages of pretotyping and prototyping. While modeling the Winch Stake, I utilized my engineering knowledge to perform structural analysis. This included bending stress and buckling hand calculations to determine the size and type of material required to construct our product. Later in the development process, I was able to use my professional experience as a welder and a fabricator to manufacture our prototypes that went through significant field testing. Some of the tasks that I undertook to manufacture the Winch Stake included mitering the structural steel tubing on a band saw, utilizing a lathe to turn our tow eyelet, milling of the anvil component, and fabrication of the side reinforcement plates out of sheet steel. Additionally, I performed all of the TIG welding on this project. During this project, I also had the opportunity to interview users and gather information on user feedback through performing an interactive user clinic. Additionally, I learned how present user feedback by formulating the content into videos for this project. 

In order to fully develop and produce this product, I believe that I need to develop an understanding of soil engineering to improve the holding capabilities of our winch stake in different types of ground. Additionally, I need to learn how to develop safe testing procedures when performing real-life testing involving a full-size vehicle and winch.