Mastercam Empowers Dynamic Educational Program
A prestigious Mechanical Engineering Technology program is located at the School of Engineering and Technology on a shared campus, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Until recently, this program used little online material and concentrated on a traditional curriculum of classroom lectures and practical projects.
“The direction we wanted to go in,” said Ed Herger, Program Lecturer, “was to provide more CAM experience as well as online and external certificate opportunities. This meant concentrating on Mastercam and the online benefits of Mastercam University, which would give our students the option of receiving a proficiency certificate in addition to a Bachelor of Science degree, with online lessons both in our lab and on the students’ own laptops and home computers.
Mr. Herger said that he uses quite a few features of Mastercam to get the most out of their CNC machines’ capabilities, pointing to the benefits of Dynamic Milling. He is especially enthusiastic when it comes to a big capstone project for his students.
“Because we’re in Indianapolis.” he said, “it’s only natural that we’re in touch with the automotive racing scene and even have our own motor sports program. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway has a demonstration transmission from an Indy car on display at their museum, and it’s cut away in a number of places so you can see what’s going on inside. Up until last fall, it was a static display.
We were fortunate to get the project from the museum where we would animate and automate the transmission so that it would be an interactive display that would rotate at a slow speed. and visitors would be able to shift it with a model of the steering wheel from the same car. All of the brackets that connected the small electric motor to turn the transmission, as well as many smaller components and a linear actuator to actually shift the linkage, were machined using Mastercam.”
You can read about this incredible capstone project in an article that originally ran in Manufacturing Engineering magazine.
This story was also rerun in Industrial Machinery Digest: CAD/CAM Revs Up a Top Capstone Project.