Top 5 Engineering Do and Don'ts: Ultimate DIY Project
Top 5 Engineering Do and Don’ts: Ultimate DIY Project
Here’s a post from one of our new senior VT members Josef Hortnagl
Overview: Valence Tek’s senior team understand the DIY inventor. You are our main focus! This post is about an Efoil designed by one of our partners. They took it from concept to prototype all fueled by their passion to create… well and their love of thrills!
Keep your heads up engineers! The more you know about DIY Projects, the better you can interface with the people you are designing for!
So, you want to make a DIY Design project huh?
Top 5 Engineering Do and Don’ts: Ultimate DIY Project
After working in multiple different engineering environments over my career, I’ve had the opportunity to design some interesting things. We all accumulate a history of memorable projects as we progress as engineers, but I know we all have a secret desire. That secret is designing something that is all for yourself, something that we make from the ground up and is just for us. DIY (do it yourself) projects are often what inspired us to pursue engineering, and so it’s only natural that after we gain some experience, we take another stab at it.
I spent the last year on such an endeavor and have come away with more wisdom than anything else. If you’re feeling the itch to dig into a special DIY design project, these 5 tips may help you get across the finish line.
Do be realistic about the scope of your project...
For context, the DIY project I worked on was to design and build an Efoil. This relatively new E-vehicle is a combination of a hydrofoil and a surfboard, and looks like an amazing DIY project. It all started when a fellow engineer of mine got the opportunity to ride one of these devices and propositioned me to work on building our own. We thought there was an opportunity to make something special and so started to lay the groundwork for the project. We even found a DIY guild and scrutinized all the aspects. We unfortunately set the scope for what we thought we could accomplish wide, basically trying to redesign the whole thing from the ground up using 3D printing, a method very different that the guild suggested.
At the time we thought we were opening the design space, but really, we were treading in a lot of unfamiliar territory. It ended up creating drastically more work than our enthusiasm would uphold alone. Having a realistic scope is vital, because your DIY project will take up a lot of your spare time, money, and will power. If the scope is too big, you may run out of one or all of these before you get a finished product.
Don’t think you can do everything yourself!
If you’re like most engineers, you have a pretty high opinion of your skills and abilities. This can sometimes cause us to isolate when we work on something near and dear to our hearts. When it comes to a DIY project you’ll find the experience far more fulfilling and drastically more likely to finish if you find a partner, or even better and group to work on it with you. This is one aspect of my DIY project that worked well.
Not only was sharing the load with my partner beneficial to making progress, we also were able to hold each other accountable. We were there to work together through design and build challenges that may have stumped us individually. It was also just more fun to create something with someone equally enthusiastic about the task at hand. It was also crucial to work together because we had different specialties that were needed for the design and build process. I know we made it as far as we did because we worked together, and it was only when we weren’t able to work as closely that the project slowed down.
Do copy as much from other designs as possible.
One of the biggest challenges we face when tackling our DIY projects is how unique we make it. Some DIY projects are just creating a personalized version of something that already exists, while others really try to make something the world has never seen before.
Our Efoil project headed down the later path and it made things much harder than we thought. Like I mentioned, we scrutinized a build guild that had pretty much everything we needed to make what we wanted. We did use some of the concepts in the design, but in the end the changes we made to try and “improve” the design negated the benefits we got from build guild. We did make great strides forward when we researched ways to improve our 3D prints and copied design elements from other print DIY projects.
The important thing is not to just find what you want to build and copy it, but to look for where designs exist that accomplish what you want. Use this existing knowledge to skip the R&D needed to prove your new idea works.
Don’t think you can reinvent the wheel!
This was probably the biggest hubris of this Ultimate DIY Project and led to our first finished prototype not being a success. Again: Top 5 Engineering Do and Don’ts! It’s so enticing when we work on our own personal project to think we’ll come up with the next engineering miracle, but we forget how much discovery a team sport is.
One of the major challenges we faced was making the battery compartment watertight. Instead of using an existing design concept or doing adequate research about the principle of creating watertight vessels, we came up with a design concept we thought was fool proof. The problem with this thinking was that to prove this would take some real-world testing. Adding additional prototyping and testing to a DIY project is a one-way ticket to overextending your resources. We recognized this too late when the design was near complete and progress in building the thing was underway.
It became apparent that this major design feature was not going to work, and therefore our overall design was drastically flawed. In the end, our first prototype was a major success in most areas except for this unproven and fatally flawed feature.
Do stay consistent and persistent.
Out of all the tips for DIY projects, this is the most important. DIY is an endeavor of heart and soul that will not be accomplished in a single day. Like I mentioned earlier, my partner and I had great success the more we worked together, and that came from our consistent and persistent dedication to each other and the project. The more you can set aside dedicated pieces of time on a regular basis for your project the higher your chances of success.
There are going to be times when you face setbacks or challenges, but the more you keep consistently coming back to your project the better. Each hour you put towards the design, preparation, and building is what will bring your project to life. It’s important to create a habit of working on your project too so that life’s challenges don’t interrupt the process. While you won’t be able to always spend the time you want on your project the more persistent you are about striking to it the faster, you’ll see things progress.
Again, having partners helps this by maintaining enthusiasm and accountability for the project to keep up a steady pace. DIY projects are so special partly because of the dedication we put into them, so stay consistent and reap the rewards.
All challenges aside, go forth and make something great!
While the Efoil project is still ongoing, it has been an absolute blast and really been a once in a lifetime experience. We often learn our greatest lessons not from academic study but from getting our hands dirty and creating something meaningful to us. I think DIY projects are one of the best ways for engineers to grow and expand their knowledge. Also, they make great life experiences, stories, and if done right accomplishments. Having a design project, you can claim as your own is a great badge of honor. Now that you can learn from my success and failures, if you have the inclination, go start your DIY design project today.
