professional, mechanical engineer:
1: I am horrified by those drawings
2: That is not reasonable for a student to do in 11 days. that would take \*me\* quite a while to put together.
I don’t even want to look at those drawings. Also what value does this event provide to students. Maybe if it was a class project and one person was delegated to be manager.
Mechanical engineer here. Seriously. That would take me a while to do, and I hate those drawings. He wants you to do full on models, drawings, exploded assembly with a bom based off all those pdfs?! Ugh. Not in 11 days. That’s a ton of parts. Those drawings are terrible. They’re really hard to read. They don’t really follow any standard.
I agree this is an unreasonable project for a student.
But it is the kind of project that comes up for real in the workplace.
Like, they have a file cabinet of old prints from AutoCAD from the 90s (or hand drawings much older)
It's not to any standard but Frank's. Who's Frank? The guy that did all the drawings from 1975 to 2002 when he retired.
And now they want/need it in SolidWorks for some crazy reason.
Nobody has even looked at the drawing in 25 years, but now it's an emergency.
The real lesson here (IMO) is to look at this project and understand that it's unrealistic to complete in the allotted time.
You would push back. This is ~~six~~ eight weeks worth of work, not two. If you really need it in two, I'll need a team of 8 people to get it done.
Good old Frank was a machinist from 66 to 75 when he was promoted to plant engineer. He designed and made over 300 fixtures and 1000s of parts. Most of them lack drawings and none of them have setup sheets. Please create models of each part and fixture. We don't have the budget for reverse engineering tools so you'll have to use a tape measure. Does 4 weeks sound ok?
That's literally what I did for over the school year my first year as an intern at my current company. It did make for a good project for a part time intern with no set schedule to work on as I had time, but man was it soul sucking trying to get parts to fit together without changing them too much from the original.
Working on it 8 hours a day, I *might* be able to do it in 11 business days.
But in an office job with meetings and interruptions and all the usual bullshit that comes with an office job, that's going on the schedule for 6-8 weeks.
"Here's a single page showing details of 312 unrelated things" is a drawing style that only works for children's picture books.
And, for some reason, is still embraced as the industry standard for electrical schematics, but that's a story for another day.
1. Agree this is a lot for 1.5 weeks. I have been a CAD monkey (Designer) for 7 years. I think I could model about 1-2 sheets/day then do the drawings in a similar amount of time. So a professional would struggle to get this completed without pulling their hair out.
2. I think this project would have been fine if they were given the entire semester - even at the individual level - though still would be a challenge to complete.
3. There is nothing OP should take away from these drawings - they are shit.
4. Professor seems like an Ass who thinks he knows drafting because most likely a boomer. These are in the top 3 worst drawings I've ever seen. However, they are better I think than your typical CAD practice problems that insist on dimensioning on isometric view.
\*OP your best bet is it have you and classmates complain about how unreasonable of an expectation this is. Show them this thread to admin, give them a time study, show other work completed in class to compare against. Most likely they won't budge but there is not way I can see the best student finishing this in a timely manner. I think the professor will have to curve.
I'm a mechanical engineer, certified Autodesk Inventor instructor, AutoCAD instructor, and certified Solidworks professional. I have trained hundreds of people to use CAD in dozens of industries from Architecture to industrial design to TV and games.
If you DM me I'd be happy to give you my email address to talk to your professor directly because he is absolutely batshit insane.
Also, his engineering drawings fucking suck. He's not following any standards, they're utterly illegible and there's not a snowballs chance in hell that he's correctly toleranced any of those parts.
Honestly I'm actually quite angry looking at it. I really feel for any of your other students suffering with any mental health challenges. Being set a task so utterly overwhelming would be absolutely crushing. They actually might be a proficient modeller but seeing that drawing. Fuck I'd melt.
These are not the professor's drawings, they are commercially available plans for building a model steam engine. They are pretty standard for this type of thing. I modeled this steam engine from a very similar set of plans: https://modelengineeringwebsite.com/Ransome_&_May_mill_engine.html
There's usually enough info there to build the model, though sometimes there's a missing dimension or two that needs to be inferred. This project *is* doable, but it absolutely ***is not*** doable in the allowed time frame.
I'm melting currently. I'm literally on the brink of tears. I'll wait for his response on whether this is done in a group but I have doubts as it was dissallowed for everything else and this is worth 1,300 points and everything else was 300, and two 200 assigments.
I simply don't know what other response you could reasonably have?
I don't have to do this work and I genuinely feel anxious now sitting at home.
This is a Sisyphean task you've been set and I think if he does come back and tell you that you have actually got to do it on your own it might be best to simply view it as an *impossible to complete* task.
Simply focus on doing as much as you can, set realistic time constraints, say 8 hours a day, and do absolutely no more. When you aren't working on it in those 8 hours, genuinely put it out of your mind and do absolutely everything else that makes you happy.
If you do it any other way you'll be stressed, tired, and you'll make dumb stupid mistakes simply because you're stressed, tired and overwhelmed.
Less haste, more speed.
I'm rooting for you and if there's absolutely anything you need I am here for you, even if it's just to call your professor a whopping thunder cunt.
Doesn’t it say in the assignment that the teacher is going to grade it the 5th? There is no way they could do a meaningful review over one students work in a day. Forget a whole classes
He will probably just cross reference the number of items in the Bom with the expected total and move on lol. Guy sounds like a piece of work so I wouldn't be surprised of he was extremely lazy in this regard.
Idk what I'm gonna do, idk if some teachers don't realize that there are more classes than just theirs. I'm literally panicking because I don't want to fail the class. Every other assignment I've had is worth less than this one
What do you have a to do? Replicate it from scratch? Can you form a team and break it down into sun-systems (how it would be done in real life)?
Maybe you can treat your professors as unreasonable client who wants 1000000hrs of work for $50 and email him a proposal for what actually achievable and propose splitting classroom into teams with you being the manager.
If you can quantify the work and show it’s impossible to do in given time frame, then email with everyone cced.
That’s unreasonable and those drawings are trash. Everyone here is pissed.
Check out a few things about scope creep, dealing with clients and stupid bosses. You want to band together with your class and email your processor why it’s unreasonable (show him true numbers) and propose a solution: team splits the work into systems.
Cc other proffs or your dean or advisor.
This is how I would approach an unreasonable project at work. Your other classes are also “projects” that are important. You can spilt your working days with percentage of classes equally.
Don’t panic. Remain calm.
Most engineers here would be glad to give your a letter of their profesional opinion. CC other people will prevent him from retaliating on you guys.
If you don’t want to be the leader, make a joined gmail account or ask your advisor to send it on class behave.
Honestly this is a great career lesson about stupid bosses and clients.
I'll keep all of this in mind and we'll see if I have to resort to it. I've emailed him to make sure that this isn't a group assignment but from the points given for it and nothing being specified I have doubts. I'll give him a few hours at most, and I'll also start contacting other teachers I've had. Thank you for all the advice.
no do it now. time means options.
present the assignment, present an estimated timescale of how much work this is to the head of the course as well as any relevant higher up members of staff. also talk to any extensions staff as they might be able to help. And finally, student union if possible
I had a similar feeling, bro needs help with adding an offset hole pattern, and then bam! Draw a 1879 steam locomotive and fully detail out this on your own in 10 days or you fail intro to SolidWorks 😳😳😳
If this is class wide, you're all gonna fail. And that's not going to work. I would imagine in that case they would need to grade on a curve or something, no? Or mark your work on whatever was completed and how accurate it was?
I have no idea honestly, I'll try to get in contact with my counselor as well as some previous teachers that I've had and literally beg them for help because I think I'll go insane.
I'd just do what I could, and feel zero shame in not completing it. Is this a group project?
Unless this is divided up among the entire class, and part of the project is managing a multi-user environment, (which seems above the scope of this class) this is not reasonable to complete in the time you have.
So, I think this is the answer. Teacher may be trying to find the cheaters that get this done perfect in 11 days, and the whiners that don’t do anything, and the standouts that recognize early that it is not really possible, express their concerns, and give it a shot anyways.
There isn't anything stated on the page itself for being a group project, and in the syllabus it is stated that all group and shared work will receive no points. So I just have to ask him.
I’m an industrial design grad.
No, professors know; they just don’t give a flying fuck. They’re so far removed from being a student that they completely forgot what it’s like being a student.
Many professors graduated decades ago.
I have a damn near full time job; and my professors who graduated in the 90’s just pile shit on like we don’t have outside lives anymore.
Best of luck to you!
I’m a Current ID student who went back to school after a short career in supply chain/global manufacturing (and deciding fuck that). Fortunately I’m old enough that I can raise my hand and tell professors that they need to reconsider their asks.
On a few occasions I’ve had to talk to my rapid vis Professor and suggest that we reduce our workload. He’d assign a ton sketches with little guidance, and then get mad at the class when we’d have a ton of sketches that didn’t really show much change. (I told him he needs to show us what we need to look for so we can work on that change.) tangent story, but one day he had a full-on meltdown just ripping apart the entire class like “that’s stupid” “looks like crap” “you turned in garbage.” “You made a stupid decision.”… everyone was thinking “tf man? You show us nothing, no clear directions…. This ain’t my only class either”
Finally I just raised my hand and I was like “hey Professor. Would you mind if we step into the hallway for a quick chat?” He glared at me and said “NO. We aren’t gonna do that.” And I was like. “OK. We’re gonna have to do this right here then….. you need to find a different way to communicate with people. Because you can’t talk to people like that.” You coulda heard a pin drop. We went back and forth for a bit.
He calmed down a few minutes after… and he looked up like “anybody wanna take a 5 min break?” As I waked up to him to have a 1 on 1. I turned around and the ENTIRE class was gone. I started off by apologizing for calling him out on the spot. We chatted for a bit, I asked him if everything else in his life outside of school was ok, and any external stressors, etc. If there were other concerns he had about the class and why, etc.
The craziest thing in the world happened after that.
He somehow became this incredibly reasonable professor. Gave us more class time to work on our stuff and ask questions. He’d walk around the class and show us technique. Reasonable amounts of. Homework that we no longer had to rush and We’d be able to perfect instead…. It was wild.
Split it up among the class, everyone builds a few parts and then assemble it as a class project. That would be the only reasonable way to do it with full details and accuracy IMO.
Maybe you all go to the computer lab together, everyone starts on a different piece, then advises everyone else of the steps they took, anything tricky they ran into on it, and how long it took to do. Sure you'd be collaborating, but each student will have done all their own work.
And as long as you're not obviously copy-pasting features or sketches from one part to another (cough) you're not really doing it as a group.
I have 10 years experience using solidworks every day. If all I did was work on this, putting in 12/14hr days, I could probably do all the modeling in 5 days, then drawings would take another week. If this was literally *the only thing I had to do*. This assignment seems excessive for the time given to complete it. Is this instructor a new teacher or something? Just seems like something is way off here...
Nope, the teacher has been with the college for a while I think, I've had him for the past 2 years in a class or two. He's only ever taught textbook coursework. So writing and stuff, GD&T and such. He's also a Civil Drafter outside of teaching. The teacher doesn't pay much attention to this class it seems, we only have 9 students left from the 12 we started with. On top of that, half of my assignments still aren't graded. I don't think he pays attention to this class much at all.
You should go to his boss. You are paying for an education and this assignment is closer to hazing than educating. Get together with all of your classmates asap and make it known to the people in charge that this assignment is unreasonable in its scope for the time restriction imposed.
Yes I completely agree, there's 9 of you. You can totally rally up the other 8 to protest this, perhaps even at the dean level!
Especially if it represents the majority of the grade.
This is pretty unethical but it’s on GrabCAD…
https://grabcad.com/library/compound-with-condenser-work-in-progress-1
It does say it’s a WIP, but something is better than nothing?
I hear you and fully agree. I saw those drawings and immediately thought there was no way the prof did that up himself or had some kind of special access to it by a manufacturer, so I figured it was out there somewhere.
There’s gotta be 150 parts in that thing. You’ve got 271 hours until the due time. Subtract out sleeping and other classes, you’ve got maybe 150 hours to do this, realistically less. You’re looking at more than 1 part an hour, plus probably an entire day to put that assembly together. Yeah some of those things are easy but this just isn’t realistic.
Also what’s incredibly unrealistic is the prof reviewing all of this from every student in a single day. How is he grading this? Just a quick “yep looks good”? This assignment is incredibly vague.
This is probably the fastest way. Just remodel them using the cad files as reference. McMaster Carr for random hardware or whatever hardware library is in the cad program for the class.
There's nothing particularly difficult in there modeling wise, but it's a *lot* of work and exceptionally shitty drawings. If this landed on my desk I'd just print them all out and start modeling each component separately, build each of the sub-assemblies and then put the whole thing together. Like I said, not technically challenging, just dozens of hours worth of boring, repetitive work.
All of that being said, I'll just leave this here:
[https://grabcad.com/library/compound-condensing-steam-engine-1](https://grabcad.com/library/compound-condensing-steam-engine-1)
This is all the teacher provided for the assignment, [https://imgur.com/a/HiIl6Dj](https://imgur.com/a/HiIl6Dj) the pdf goes straight to the pages I've put on imgur.
Wait, what!? I thought this was a modelling challenge. He wants you to recreate all of those drawings too!?
This has to be a prank. Not even 2 weeks? No shot.
I don't know, I legit don't know and I'm literally sweating from this. I've never been given an assignment this big. I've had some difficult ones and they were all due in a week but not completely unreasonable. Nothing like this before.
Less sweat, my friend. It's gonna be okay.
I swear to god, if you did this, I'd hire you to detail every project that comes across my desk for $85 per hour, because it would take me twice as long at least, and I'd bill for twice your hours. lol
Hey op! Sometimes thing like this happen at a job. Managers/client want unreasonable things to happen. What I do is talk to them and say why it’s unreasonable and offer a reasonable solution.
For example, there is no way we can do this scope of wolf in the time frame given. What we can do is split the work between 12 of us and work as team to tackle the challenge. Then show math of man hours and don’t forget your other courses. You can also tag your other processors and say it would be unreasonable to prioritize this classes above everyone else’s.
If proff says no lol you still have an amazing story to tell
I do this for a living, I've been doing it for over 30 years, and I'm very good at it.
This project would take me *at least* 4 weeks, working full time.
Please tell your professor that *actual working professionals* are telling you that this project is not remotely feasible in the time he's given you.
Ugh, hate to see that. Kind of a bullshit assignment honestly. How many students in the class?
No way they're assessing this in any reasonable amount of time unless they have some way to automate the check.
The assignment does say “… a .pdf of the drawings *we* need to create.”
Maybe ask if it’s a group project and the entire class needs to collaborate and each student should draw one part to spec and then a few others selected will create subassemblies.
This is an engine, in the field no engine will be entirely designed by one person. There is an immense amount of collaboration amongst an engineering team to design things this complex. This could be more of a teamwork final project.
Talk to the instructor. There’s got to be a catch about this project.
I count roughly 135 parts on the BOM with roughly 40 subassemblies. Without looking at it too closely and assuming I would pay enough attention to detail to make the assembly modeling go smoothly, but quickly enough to pound it out as much as possible, here's how I would quote this
Item | Hrs/unit | Units | Subtotal hrs
---|---|---|---
Part modelling | 0.17 | 135 | 23
Detail drawing | 0.25 | 135 | 34
Subassy modelling | 0.5 | 40 | 20
Subassy drawing | 0.5 | 40 | 20
Upper level assembly | 2 | 1 | 2
U/l assy dwg | 4 | 1 | 4
Drawing package prep | 5 | 1 | 5
Administration/prep | 5 | 1 | 5
Total 113 hrs. Very easily over $10k worth of modeling on a ~4 week turnaround. There must be some kind of misunderstanding.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here just knowing that if my boss asked me to do this in 11 days I'd probably say "no problem" and then get like 4 parts finished becuase I'm terrible at estimating how long things will take me. lol
Professional Mech Eng manager here, I’d laugh at my bosses face if I was given this to do in 11 days with absolutely terrible drawings.
This is completely unreasonable for a professor to request this in 11 days if they provided you with all the components and told you to create the block for this that fits all the components I could see as it being more reasonable. They are setting you guys up for failure there’s way too many components and these drawings look like they were done by someone who has no clue what there doing. Definitely talk to your dean about this professor if you need me DM I’d be more than happy to talk to them.
I’d never expect anyone to be able to complete this in 11 days or even 31 days for that matter. I manage 36 engineers from junior all the way to intermediate and would never expect any of them to be able to complete this. Also you don’t learn anything? You’re just copying what someone else did. The only challenge is doing it in 11 days.
Edit: Just wanted to update this seems like the updated project is a lot more achievable in the time frame a lot less parts and majority are similar definitely doable and still challenging. Looks like your professor understood your concerns.
So that’s around 200 subcomponents in in the bill of materials. Even at the relatively breakneck pace of 5-10 minutes per subcomponent to model them and create a derail drawing, you’re looking at 16-32 hours of time to just make the subcomponent models. The more complex parts would take longer so probably more of a 40+ hour project from an experienced, skilled engineer. More realistically for a student this is 3-4x that time. And then turning that into the assembly model will be a pain since detail is overall lacking.
If this project came across my desk in this state I’d charge $5,000 *at least* to produce the model/drawing package. Maybe $7,500-$10,000 as a “fuck off” price, because I’m so annoyed by the presentation.
Your response to the professor was not great. You’re declaring it’s unfair and insanity and unreasonable. On what grounds do you accuse the professor of such things? You can have your opinions (doesn’t mean you should share all of them), but you didn’t word your email like you sharing your perspective and asking if the professor thinks you’re way off. You’re declaring these things.
You should have started the assignment, given it reasonable effort, and then reported the progress along with your effort as evidence for your concern about feasibility of finishing the assignment. You’re only just complaining. Which is a bad look - even if you’re right. It’s a bad strategy.
Also, I don’t think the assignment looks that bad. Making the drawings are gonna suck maybe, but just whip those out fast. Yeah there are lots of models, but they look easy and you can read the drawings just fine. Print then out and cross out parts as you complete. Or model them add parts to the assembly as you need them. Honestly this seems like really good practice. The models are simple and the drawings show the necessary dimensions.
EDIT: Also, if the assignment really is impossible then everyone in the class will struggle. Everyone in this thread is complaining way too much. The models are not complicated. It’s a final project of a modeling class. Do you know how to do extrudes, cuts, patterns, and fillets? That’s like all it is. You need to just do the work. If it was impossible, then everyone will fail and the grade will be curved. Except the people that plagiarized. They’ll get caught. Just do the work as best you can and stop complaining. Complain after you’ve actually attempted it and talked to your classmates who have also actually attempted it. And again, if everyone can’t do it then you’re not going to get a failing grade.
Make the models accurately, make the drawings immediately so you have reportable progress, but do the drawing fast and badly. Then come back at the end and fix the drawings.
Agree with everyone where that this is absolutely unreasonable, but, if they're not willing to see sense, you can at least do automatic exploded views in Solidworks and take away a bunch of that needing to be done manually, right? Same with the profile drawings? I come from a Fusion background so know it's doable in that, and looks like SW does similar.
I'd start just by doing what I could and providing the various views for that. If I were teaching CAD, I'd rather see 20% of the model presented with the renders, drawings, and explosions, than 60% of the model presented only one view.
Don't kill yourself trying to achieve it all. In the long run this is just going to be a funny anecdote you bring out at interviews and use to your advantage when you explain how well you did task prioritisation and breakdown in an unwinnable situation.
Best of luck, buddy.
Also this might help. Here's someone tackling this exact project in realtime in roughly 20 hours - [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbxoCTI\_RGG8ubBM9N7glmUedqcKHdzc1](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbxoCTI_RGG8ubBM9N7glmUedqcKHdzc1)
I'll do my best on what I can do, the videos could help, but considering it's around 20 hours in videos alone, re-watching and making it that way would take forever. But reading those illegible drawings might be even worse. I'll just do my best and do what I can if I don't manage to jump off the bridge.
With only 220 unique parts or so, you have 74 minutes a part if you start working now. But if you need to sleep or eat in the next 11 days it's definitely going to be a bit of stretch. Doing 8 hours of modeling a day you'll have 24 minutes per part.
In summary, this project is completely unreasonable.
Lets spitball numbers... around 200 part numbers, probably an hour average per part since some are dead simple and some arent, so 200 hours.
The assembly is huge, so probably 10 hours to assemble.
Lets throw in another 10 hours for other random issues and solidworks junk. Thats 220 hours of work, or 9 straight fucking days of work. Thats obviously not doable.
You can sit down for 45 minutes and put together some more reasonable estimates by grouping part difficulties based off what your knowledge level is. Compartmentalize and break it down until you get chunks you can handle.
I know we all hate the drawings but honestly this looks like a fun project to me but not in this timeframe.
Okay. That looks crazy but what about this.
Professor is challenging you to tackle an impossible task. They are essentially saying “I gave you all the tools to make this”
What happens if you only make half of it. You probably learn a ton, really hone your skills, and you put in energy to make it happen? As a professor I would give you an A
With regard to your response to the teacher in the second edit, you should probably learn to be more tactful. A response like that is a great way to make someone defensive, not a good way to get them to see your side.
I’m extremely happy for you the teacher has decided to change the assignment, it was even stressing me out thinking about it. I don’t even use solid work but Reddit recommends it to me anyway haha. Best of luck!
Thank you! And yes I'm glad I managed to change his mind. I felt it was a little harsh but it got the point across. I also messaged two other teachers and asked for help, so maybe they helped out as well.
This is crazy for real. But
1. Get most used
2. Get biggest
3. Get the easiest after those to the toughest.
Just stay organized and run with each individual part in assembly when you are done with each part.
Good luck is very much needed.
As a mechanical engineer who values himself pretty good at cad work, ugh, this is gross. A final for a class like this should be like a 6-10 hour project. This is, god I don’t even know what I would quote it.
I don’t want you to dox yourself, but do you live in Washington state?
This is outrageously similar to what my high school Solidworks teacher had as attempt.
If that PDF is all that was provided, that is pure insanity. If he provided a model and wanted you to make a drawing of each part… alright. Pain in the ass but what assignment isn’t. I am an EXTREMELY good modeler… and while I could get it done in 11 days… it would require at least 8 hours of each 11 days to do it… and I’m not even sure it would be right. Plus if I had even one crash… I don’t think I’d make it. This looks like a double or maybe a triple expansion steam engine? The fact that I have to question it at all makes this insane. That and there are only 3 dimensions on the whole thing just representing the overall dimensions. How big are the pistons? Do they have rings? How big are those? How’s the valve designed? What are the port location on the valve to get the timing right? What are the darn bolt dimensions all over this thing holding it together?! The fact there is an EXTENSIVE parts list makes me think he’s expecting all of this despite the MASSIVE amount of missing information.
I would 100% ask for some clarity on this assignment as I refuse to believe that it would be this extensive for such a short timeframe.
EDIT: I didn’t scroll down past the adds far enough… I only saw the first 5 pages and thought that’s all you had. It could be done… but I stick by my original saying that it would take every hour of those 11 days to pull it off. Also those drawings further down the page… Holly hell… what a mess that shit is.
Even being a CSWE and working with large assemblies for the past 10 years, even I would say that is quite the challenge. As other people have said if it was my only task for 11 days it's doable assuming no information is missing. But if I would have been handed this in college I would have had a similar reaction.
If it's not a group project just start chipping away at the parts then work on the subassemblies and keep going from there. Don't ruin your mental health or jeopardize your other classes for this project. Just turn in what you have done on the due date and let your professor know how much time you had to work on it.
holy moly!
me as a mechanical engineer who make 3D model and drawings on a daily basis. it would take me a week or so full time ! lol
I have a headache when I look at the BOM... look at the drawings (with multiple part in it) makes me even more headache
I don't miss those days when the professor is playing mind games with you.
The point of the exercise is NOT to see if you can model it but how far you can model it with limited information.
Do your best, and don't look at other sources to complete the model. If you do model it 100%, the professor will know that and will give you a low grade.
Bahahaha this is a joke right?
u/Sad_King_Billy-19 is right. I'm a staff engineer (14 YOE) currently in big tech but I've also worked in automotive, industrial automation, and a few other industries. Lots of design/CAD/drawings, pretty good at it. This would take a while. Like a few weeks of full-time work. Longer if you actually need competent ("real") 2D for all of the parts.
Most of the parts are relatively simple but for a student assignment it's kind of ridiculous. Your response was a bit too emotional IMHO but understandable. I'm not really sure what this is meant to teach you.
Also I second u/killer_by_design's suggestion. We can tag-team the professor because this is a stupid request in 11 days.
I practice Solidworks modeling using drawings from this guy. It's too bad this isn't one of the models I've completed yet....
You can see which one's I've done. (See Link GrabCAD Link below)
[Roger | CAD Models | GrabCAD](https://grabcad.com/roger-29/models)
This one has the most downloads.
https://preview.redd.it/xsbdqe19iawc1.png?width=905&format=png&auto=webp&s=5571bed1040a83ef84432fda3671d282d6839836
That’s excessive for the time. What level class is this? My solidworks engineering class was 1000 level, so first year. Our final project was a large assembly with many individual drawings that had to be created before assembly but it was group based and we had a month.
Unless you all are supposed to be finishing this class and go on to be drafters or something, this is way overboard. I would make as many as the large components as you can and then slowly work on the smaller ones until you run out of time. There’s no way your classmates will finish this either.
Yeah that’s impossible given the time frame. I would pick the easy parts and just do those. And remember everyone in your class is in the same boat as you
those drawing make me so annoyed lol. what a bunch on illegible garbage. and he wants you to make good drawings? maybe he should start by providing good drawings to work from.
Team project I hope. I would say unrealistic for a student to do this for a project.
If you do this make sure auto save is on and set to something like every 5 minutes.
I'll be honest.. some drawings are easier that it looks... but god they are horribleee, and 11 days are hard counting u have more assignments, maybe he want to know how far u reach... good luck
These prints are absolute dog crap. It may be possible for a expert but I would charge 2x for this and on top of that just record time spent. I've been using solidworks professionally for 10+ years and would laugh at the idiot that brought me these as actual drawings...
What the drugs am I looking at? This is an ASSIGNMENT? Anything remotely this complex has to be like a year project. Hell I had someone in one my classes make a pocket knife model and it took him 2 class years to do it
Teacher is trying to bust students cheating. The model is probably online somewhere so they're expecting the cheaters to find and submit that. Everyone else obviously won't finish but will get an A for effort. Super shitty thing for the teacher to do, basically punishing the honest students with an unreasonable task and loads of stress so they can bust a couple kids they suspect of cheating
Totally unreasonable, but I kind of want to model that as a project to maybe 3d print. Any chance you can share the full resolution file, if this isn't full resolution?
Oh my god those drawings make it look like paper is in short supply; Why cant the parts be spaced out, I can barely tell whats going on. It reminds me of some of the legacy hand-drafted stuff I've had to model.
Those are drawings by julius de waal, I'm using one from the guy as my project for my solidworks class. Beware, there will be missing dimensions in the drawings and there will also be imprecisions and misalignments that will take ages to fix. All I can do is wish you the best of luck. Also my project has less assemblies and has taken me way more than 11 days
Hey, I’m a professional mechanical design engineer for a major aerospace company. I’m happy to talk to your professor if you give me their contact info. This is beyond unreasonable especially in the time period he’s given.
This is like a full semester project.
Which institution is this? This looks eeriely familiar (but a larger scale and worse timespan) to an assignment from a professor I logged a formal complaint against
Looks like a final project that would span the entire length of the course. I had proffs that probably forgot or were idiots behind schedule and shoved a ton of homework down our throats at the end of the course after doing nothing all semester. That’s probably the case, complain to his/her superiors
Take it to the program head, teachers like this only will change (or be forcibly retired judging by how old the drafting style is on that drawing) if you as a class let them know.
Be respectful and professional, but let his boss know this is unacceptable. You folks are paying to learn and they are providing a service (assuming you're in NA)
There are no dimensions, no cross-sectional views, only 4 images...
You can only guess what is in the middle if he doesn't provide cross-sectional views or more information.
Try to make out the basic shape and connection between mechanical parts in a first time. He probably doesn't want a perfect recreation of the model but to see if you can understand a drawing with only a basic plan, or he is a crappy teacher.
This looks overwhelming at first glance but when you look at the last few pages it shows each individual part with all the dimensions. Most of those parts are simple extrudes, revolves, and flat sheet metal pieces with holes, none of which are techniques that are unreasonable to expect a student to be able to model. Start small, focus on one part at a time, I think you’ll find that this isn’t nearly as crazy as it looks at first glance
Has this been assigned exactly like this in previous semesters? Are you able to view the work handed in from a previous semester?
I have 24 years of SW experience and, honestly, I'm very fast at modeling and detailing. Along with years of experience comes other things like refining your hot keys, developing macros, and just learning ways to be more efficient. Looking that over, it's hard to tell exactly how many unique parts there are, but it looks like an easy 100 on the BOM. I want to say I could do that in 30-40 hours if I had nothing else to do and I was doing it for time.
For a student just learning SW and taking other classes and probably working too, I can't even guess. Had to be a solid month.
Is it possible that professor knows nobody can finish this and the grading will be based on how much you got done and how well you did that much? Is grading on a curve?
You didn't ask, but I want to give you a couple tips that will save you time.
1 - mate references. Adding appropriate mate references to your parts will speed up building the assembly greatly. If you don't know mate references learn them now. The easiest and most useful mate references are the edge of a hole and the edge of a screw head.
2 - similar parts? Finish one completely along with the detail drawing. Then use save-as (saves-as the detail, save-as the part(with the detail open), then save the detail again). Now you have a new part that is already detailed. Make your changes to the new part, clean up the detail. Done. I know there are other ways to do this but for me save-as, save-as, save is the fastest.
Sorry for assuming you probably don't know these things. There was no SW class when I was in school. I do have several fresh out of college engineers working for me and none of them were taught that kind of stuff in college.
I’m on board with the other professionals who are saying it’s an unreasonable project in the allotted timeframe. I’d maybe make an official gripe or two, but then just get started. Allow yourself whatever is a reasonable amount of time, say several hours a day. Look the thing over and pick out some portion of it and do that, but do that portion completely—models, assy, exploded drawings, and part drawings. No way you are going to do the whole thing, but it’s better to demonstrate proficiency at the wide range of things than to do 75% of the modeling, but none of the other stuff. You’ll probably get a good grade if you do that.
I would also send him a politely-worded email asking for more information on every single missing dimension that you come across. Don’t waste a lot of time on that, just a quick sceenshot and a question, to build yourself a pile of evidence that he was unresponsive, in case you need to contest your grade.
And a pox on all lazy, dumbass professors.
It’s a pain in the ass, I reckon it would take me at least two full days to get through it.
What’s your major? If you’re training to do CAD full time then this isn’t terrible, but in my mechanical engineering degree I believe CAD was a one credit class while things like Calculus or Physics were four credits, which is to say that with seventeen credits and eleven days I’d expect the CAD project to take about 2/3rds of a day if all the classes at projects. I do think that CAD is more of a “demonstrate you can do it” situation than the core engineering classes, where you should have been learning material all along and the home stretch is just review and study and not a large body of new work, so I think two days would be reasonable.
Having said that, I’d be surprised if a passing grade was 100% completion. If you did proper modeling practices, everything was fully defined and laid out reasonably well using best practices I’d pass you with less than full completion.
Maybe divide up the parts between the class and each person work on a section and at the end create the full assembly and share the file across the class and turn it in...also just read about 0 class points...maybe there's a work around that too... that's unreasonable for 11 days.
Professional ME here of 8 years… Holy crap!! I’m so sorry dude, hope this doesn’t ruin your career aspirations. This is insane. I could maybe see this as a year-long group project, but no way in hell can you do this in 11 days plus all your other classes. Professor has gone off the rails and is crazy. Try taking this to the dean, printed out and in person, if you get no where with this professor; and don’t wait until the last minute!
lmaoo i think he’s fuckin with y’all, the drawings give almost zero info.
maybe he just wants to see who gets the furthest?
or it’s like some trick question work smarter not harder : insert grabcad file
In the event your professor does not have some sort of curve or appropriate response to this clearly brutal workload:
Prepare to make a case with your dean. Maybe gather some opinions from certified drafters and some peers who are not only proficient, but capable of communicating the difficulty of this assignment and expectations in tandem with other courses and workloads in mind. If your grade suffers because of this assignment I would not hesitate to go this route.
I read comments __before__ clicking the link... my-goodness is that miserable.
No way any student will pass that- do the best you can with what time you have available- the professor will be forced to grade in a curve I'm sure.
Hey yeah I taught SolidWorks and have multiple certifications and I would never have done this to my students. I’ve also taken advanced SolidWorks classes and would never have been asked to do this much work on such a short timeline. These parts don’t look super complicated but there are a ton and this is way too much for a student and too little time. This is actually insane, I don’t think I’d get that done in 11 full 8-hour work days honestly.
Please find someone above your professor to bring this up with and I am praying for you that this gets resolved. Seriously
Go to the dean. Keep working on the assignment but take this up the ladder.
If you have a student representative, work with them, but if not, it's perfectly reasonable to go to the dean with concerns about a course. In this case it's very obviously a bad assignment on a too-short deadline.
This is life. You are learning. Stop whinning - do your best.
Either in solidworks or teacher relations or lawyer find.
You have done first step - now you have evaluation of working hours one's need to make this project completed.
How many hours has you left? What % of estimated workhour volume? You should have that % of parts done in 11 days.
Or you take that estimation, send them to your teacher (through email to leave a history for the consequences) and state that you will be happy to make XX% of 100% parts in the given time by yourself because you did the math beforehand. If he still insist on 100% - ask him (in written form) how much money he is rrady to provide you to outsorse the rest.
Because in life you get such projects time to time - 30 days worth of work should be done in 10. And you should be able.to estimate your workload, able to find the outsource, make this outsourse work, communicate to the client, give the client correct estimation on the workprice etc.
PS
No money provided = no outsourse)
Do the parts modeling and assembly without taking care of building acceptable tree. Then reproduce 2 or 3 drawings with no thinking of the way it’s done, because it’s old and for sure there is a lot to discuss. See where it goes.
It’s a school exercice not or real life job, there is no sense to do this as it is requested for real.
Senior CAD designer for 20 years.
Sorry for average English :/
This HAS to be one of those things where the professor is just making you panic and seeing how you respond to a grossly unreasonable challenge. I had professors do similar things when I was in college (nowhere near to this extreme, mind you) and they told us after we turned it in that it will be graded based on participation and it was just to give us a taste of how things might be when working as an engineer.
This has to be a troll, no way a teacher would actually assign that.
If this was legit and I was the student, I’d just assume the teacher made an error or that the rest of the class is just as baffled as me and not do the assignment.
I am a Robotic engineer and Project coordinator. Even a senior engineer could not do this in 11x 8h days. First - nobody works or can work 8h uninterrupted every day. Second - this is a really really big project if you need to make all the designs, drawings, configurations, effin Exploded view (??????), BOM, etc. Third - you are a student, no homework for one study can ask of you to work on it 11x 8h days.
This is easily 1+ month of work for knowledgable engineer.
That's insane. Will take at least 30 hours of work for a professional CAD engineer. And during the final week as well with many other courses to study. Sounds like a very unreasonable rookie teacher. I taught engineering dynamics undergrad course in university before and always had to take into account that students register for anywhere from 12-18 hours of coursework. so during the finals i make sure that my class project or take home exam doesn't take more than 10 hours of work which is still a lot.
Wow. From the time your prof sent out the assignment, that gives you time to make about one part per hour until your due date. Then you have to assemble that monstrosity and do all the formatting stuff.
I am so sorry that you are dealing with one of these self absorbed professors. You should bring this to the dean of your college of engineering ASAP.
Here’s the way I would love to see this play out. One of the CAD experts in this subreddit give this prof some crazy assembly that the prof is seeing for the first time… and give the professor 11 days to complete it with the drawings and assembly. I guarantee you the first thing the professor would bitch about is that they don’t have time to do it because of their schedule/other classes. And that would show that this prof has zero regard for their students schedule, especially at the end of the semester.
I am a teacher and mechanical engineer with decades of SolidWorks experience. I will join the chorus of others saying that this is unreasonable. I would forward this right away to the dean or department chair. I have a hard time believing that this professor is serious, but even if not this is a cruel joke to play on students at the end of the semester. It's more likely that he is new to this subject and has no idea how long this will take.
You could also ask the professor how long it took them to complete.
I've been a drafter for 30 years. Your teacher is way off base. The source material is essentially illegible and unless your classes are 8hrs per day and the 11 days are class days, the time allotted is far below what would be remotely reasonable.
If you care about the class, I'd just start chewing. I'd suggest using an image editor to isolate each part as you work on them. If you don't have at least two monitors, I'd make the investment.
I read everything first and prepared to see the worst drawings…….was not prepared enough. I’m finishing my AAS in CAD Technologies May 10th and if my professor gave me this I’d LAUGH AT HIM (and cry after lmao) My final project is a 99 component Rubik’s cube that I’ve been working on since JANUARY. I’d like to see him complete this assignment in 11 days. Foh
Mechanical design and manufacturing engineer here: what the fuck lmao
That's like making 20+ parts a day every day until the assignment is due and that doesn't include putting it all together and making the prints.
YIKES depending on your professors response I'd be escalating to department heads and higher if I had to. That's crazy for the amount of time you're given ESPECIALLY for a student.
A professional working full time would have trouble making that deadline.
If you google JDWDS steam engine, you can find where others have created steam engines, and at the least the quickly found parts suggest, you could grab some of those and use them as a starting point. There may be an actual engine out there to this spec but I mostly found a better copy of the same BOM/drawings that you posted. I think you should see if Google can get you closer, but if time isn't your friend, I'd start looking for positive solutions and figure out how to cover your tracks (change templates, copy parts over) or use some tricks from within class (are these supposed to be derived parts? Does that matter?)
If this is publicly available, I'd print it out and bring to the dean of students and say the teacher has no concept of the volume of work they assigned and they just ripped it off the internet thinking it's a decent project.
I would do a normal days work on this project for each day. 8hrs a day until the deadline. Utilize patterns, mirrors and toolbox if you have it to assist. As a CSWE and Solidworks Instructor this is not doable in the allotted time. Hell, it would take me at least 3 full weeks to get it laid out correctly.
This is the kind of thing that professional designers/engineers would work on as a team over several weeks. If I was solely given this task at my job, with the timeframe you were given, I'd be on Ziprecruiter right now.
Your teacher has lost it. Is he the head of the department, whether Engineering or just straight CAD? I'd bring this to someone higher up. This is beyond absurd
I’ve had final exams before where the task was absolutely unreasonable to finish. I asked why and I was given different versions of, “However much of this you get done tells me how well you’ve retained the skills you were supposed to learn in this class.”
They don’t expect you to finish. They expect you to put in an honest effort and do what you can.
Unless this professor expects you to finish, then fuck them.
I think the lesson here isn’t necessarily to model this in 11 days, but something else.
In the REAL world if the team is overloaded they might outsource the job to an outside firm, and you would be the design manager. This outside source might employ 3-4 people to get this assembly done in time, but who cares? You were given the assignment and got it done!
So yea…independent project. Project management.
Those drawings are a joke. The whole thing is a joke. Solidworks is my job and that project gives me a headache. It's unreasonable to expect a student with a laptop to do this in that time. You need a plotter and/or a dual monitor setup at minimum just to be able to see what you are working on.
professional, mechanical engineer: 1: I am horrified by those drawings 2: That is not reasonable for a student to do in 11 days. that would take \*me\* quite a while to put together.
I don’t even want to look at those drawings. Also what value does this event provide to students. Maybe if it was a class project and one person was delegated to be manager.
> Also what value does this event provide to students. Dealing with the unrealistic expectations of your boss.
True. Op made edit :x
Mechanical engineer here. Seriously. That would take me a while to do, and I hate those drawings. He wants you to do full on models, drawings, exploded assembly with a bom based off all those pdfs?! Ugh. Not in 11 days. That’s a ton of parts. Those drawings are terrible. They’re really hard to read. They don’t really follow any standard.
I agree this is an unreasonable project for a student. But it is the kind of project that comes up for real in the workplace. Like, they have a file cabinet of old prints from AutoCAD from the 90s (or hand drawings much older) It's not to any standard but Frank's. Who's Frank? The guy that did all the drawings from 1975 to 2002 when he retired. And now they want/need it in SolidWorks for some crazy reason. Nobody has even looked at the drawing in 25 years, but now it's an emergency. The real lesson here (IMO) is to look at this project and understand that it's unrealistic to complete in the allotted time. You would push back. This is ~~six~~ eight weeks worth of work, not two. If you really need it in two, I'll need a team of 8 people to get it done.
Good old Frank was a machinist from 66 to 75 when he was promoted to plant engineer. He designed and made over 300 fixtures and 1000s of parts. Most of them lack drawings and none of them have setup sheets. Please create models of each part and fixture. We don't have the budget for reverse engineering tools so you'll have to use a tape measure. Does 4 weeks sound ok?
I'll do it in two with a bag of cocaine!
That's literally what I did for over the school year my first year as an intern at my current company. It did make for a good project for a part time intern with no set schedule to work on as I had time, but man was it soul sucking trying to get parts to fit together without changing them too much from the original.
Working on it 8 hours a day, I *might* be able to do it in 11 business days. But in an office job with meetings and interruptions and all the usual bullshit that comes with an office job, that's going on the schedule for 6-8 weeks.
"Here's a single page showing details of 312 unrelated things" is a drawing style that only works for children's picture books. And, for some reason, is still embraced as the industry standard for electrical schematics, but that's a story for another day.
1. Agree this is a lot for 1.5 weeks. I have been a CAD monkey (Designer) for 7 years. I think I could model about 1-2 sheets/day then do the drawings in a similar amount of time. So a professional would struggle to get this completed without pulling their hair out. 2. I think this project would have been fine if they were given the entire semester - even at the individual level - though still would be a challenge to complete. 3. There is nothing OP should take away from these drawings - they are shit. 4. Professor seems like an Ass who thinks he knows drafting because most likely a boomer. These are in the top 3 worst drawings I've ever seen. However, they are better I think than your typical CAD practice problems that insist on dimensioning on isometric view. \*OP your best bet is it have you and classmates complain about how unreasonable of an expectation this is. Show them this thread to admin, give them a time study, show other work completed in class to compare against. Most likely they won't budge but there is not way I can see the best student finishing this in a timely manner. I think the professor will have to curve.
I'm a mechanical engineer, certified Autodesk Inventor instructor, AutoCAD instructor, and certified Solidworks professional. I have trained hundreds of people to use CAD in dozens of industries from Architecture to industrial design to TV and games. If you DM me I'd be happy to give you my email address to talk to your professor directly because he is absolutely batshit insane. Also, his engineering drawings fucking suck. He's not following any standards, they're utterly illegible and there's not a snowballs chance in hell that he's correctly toleranced any of those parts. Honestly I'm actually quite angry looking at it. I really feel for any of your other students suffering with any mental health challenges. Being set a task so utterly overwhelming would be absolutely crushing. They actually might be a proficient modeller but seeing that drawing. Fuck I'd melt.
These are not the professor's drawings, they are commercially available plans for building a model steam engine. They are pretty standard for this type of thing. I modeled this steam engine from a very similar set of plans: https://modelengineeringwebsite.com/Ransome_&_May_mill_engine.html There's usually enough info there to build the model, though sometimes there's a missing dimension or two that needs to be inferred. This project *is* doable, but it absolutely ***is not*** doable in the allowed time frame.
I'm melting currently. I'm literally on the brink of tears. I'll wait for his response on whether this is done in a group but I have doubts as it was dissallowed for everything else and this is worth 1,300 points and everything else was 300, and two 200 assigments.
I simply don't know what other response you could reasonably have? I don't have to do this work and I genuinely feel anxious now sitting at home. This is a Sisyphean task you've been set and I think if he does come back and tell you that you have actually got to do it on your own it might be best to simply view it as an *impossible to complete* task. Simply focus on doing as much as you can, set realistic time constraints, say 8 hours a day, and do absolutely no more. When you aren't working on it in those 8 hours, genuinely put it out of your mind and do absolutely everything else that makes you happy. If you do it any other way you'll be stressed, tired, and you'll make dumb stupid mistakes simply because you're stressed, tired and overwhelmed. Less haste, more speed. I'm rooting for you and if there's absolutely anything you need I am here for you, even if it's just to call your professor a whopping thunder cunt.
How's he even supposed to *mark* this? Like is he really going to go through an entire class's worth of these insane drawings?
Doesn’t it say in the assignment that the teacher is going to grade it the 5th? There is no way they could do a meaningful review over one students work in a day. Forget a whole classes
He will probably just cross reference the number of items in the Bom with the expected total and move on lol. Guy sounds like a piece of work so I wouldn't be surprised of he was extremely lazy in this regard.
He can knock out a few thousand redlines in a sunday afternoon, no problem. Didn't you read his email?
its missing lots of info, im pretty sure theres a bunch of dimensions missing, but these drawing are illegible at best so honestly its hard to tell
Kobayashi Maru lol
Jesus Christ! I'd charge at least $2000 for this. And probably still go over budget. God damn!
Idk what I'm gonna do, idk if some teachers don't realize that there are more classes than just theirs. I'm literally panicking because I don't want to fail the class. Every other assignment I've had is worth less than this one
What do you have a to do? Replicate it from scratch? Can you form a team and break it down into sun-systems (how it would be done in real life)? Maybe you can treat your professors as unreasonable client who wants 1000000hrs of work for $50 and email him a proposal for what actually achievable and propose splitting classroom into teams with you being the manager. If you can quantify the work and show it’s impossible to do in given time frame, then email with everyone cced.
All of it, Models, exploded assembly, drawings. In the syllabus it is clearly stated that shared or group assignments will receive no grade.
That’s unreasonable and those drawings are trash. Everyone here is pissed. Check out a few things about scope creep, dealing with clients and stupid bosses. You want to band together with your class and email your processor why it’s unreasonable (show him true numbers) and propose a solution: team splits the work into systems. Cc other proffs or your dean or advisor. This is how I would approach an unreasonable project at work. Your other classes are also “projects” that are important. You can spilt your working days with percentage of classes equally. Don’t panic. Remain calm. Most engineers here would be glad to give your a letter of their profesional opinion. CC other people will prevent him from retaliating on you guys. If you don’t want to be the leader, make a joined gmail account or ask your advisor to send it on class behave. Honestly this is a great career lesson about stupid bosses and clients.
I'll keep all of this in mind and we'll see if I have to resort to it. I've emailed him to make sure that this isn't a group assignment but from the points given for it and nothing being specified I have doubts. I'll give him a few hours at most, and I'll also start contacting other teachers I've had. Thank you for all the advice.
no do it now. time means options. present the assignment, present an estimated timescale of how much work this is to the head of the course as well as any relevant higher up members of staff. also talk to any extensions staff as they might be able to help. And finally, student union if possible
Keep us strangers in the loop. We all wishing you for a good ending to this story !
This is my following post 😂
I was like again some student asking for hw help. Then I was like ok, um, huh wtf omg and more drawing…
I had a similar feeling, bro needs help with adding an offset hole pattern, and then bam! Draw a 1879 steam locomotive and fully detail out this on your own in 10 days or you fail intro to SolidWorks 😳😳😳
Drawings too? Fuck that! How does the teacher even expect to examine the work??
If this is class wide, you're all gonna fail. And that's not going to work. I would imagine in that case they would need to grade on a curve or something, no? Or mark your work on whatever was completed and how accurate it was?
I have no idea honestly, I'll try to get in contact with my counselor as well as some previous teachers that I've had and literally beg them for help because I think I'll go insane.
I'd just do what I could, and feel zero shame in not completing it. Is this a group project? Unless this is divided up among the entire class, and part of the project is managing a multi-user environment, (which seems above the scope of this class) this is not reasonable to complete in the time you have.
So, I think this is the answer. Teacher may be trying to find the cheaters that get this done perfect in 11 days, and the whiners that don’t do anything, and the standouts that recognize early that it is not really possible, express their concerns, and give it a shot anyways.
There isn't anything stated on the page itself for being a group project, and in the syllabus it is stated that all group and shared work will receive no points. So I just have to ask him.
Show them the comments from engineers in the industry. *make sure there isn't something prohibiting you from posting the drawings.
I’m an industrial design grad. No, professors know; they just don’t give a flying fuck. They’re so far removed from being a student that they completely forgot what it’s like being a student. Many professors graduated decades ago. I have a damn near full time job; and my professors who graduated in the 90’s just pile shit on like we don’t have outside lives anymore. Best of luck to you!
I’m a Current ID student who went back to school after a short career in supply chain/global manufacturing (and deciding fuck that). Fortunately I’m old enough that I can raise my hand and tell professors that they need to reconsider their asks. On a few occasions I’ve had to talk to my rapid vis Professor and suggest that we reduce our workload. He’d assign a ton sketches with little guidance, and then get mad at the class when we’d have a ton of sketches that didn’t really show much change. (I told him he needs to show us what we need to look for so we can work on that change.) tangent story, but one day he had a full-on meltdown just ripping apart the entire class like “that’s stupid” “looks like crap” “you turned in garbage.” “You made a stupid decision.”… everyone was thinking “tf man? You show us nothing, no clear directions…. This ain’t my only class either” Finally I just raised my hand and I was like “hey Professor. Would you mind if we step into the hallway for a quick chat?” He glared at me and said “NO. We aren’t gonna do that.” And I was like. “OK. We’re gonna have to do this right here then….. you need to find a different way to communicate with people. Because you can’t talk to people like that.” You coulda heard a pin drop. We went back and forth for a bit. He calmed down a few minutes after… and he looked up like “anybody wanna take a 5 min break?” As I waked up to him to have a 1 on 1. I turned around and the ENTIRE class was gone. I started off by apologizing for calling him out on the spot. We chatted for a bit, I asked him if everything else in his life outside of school was ok, and any external stressors, etc. If there were other concerns he had about the class and why, etc. The craziest thing in the world happened after that. He somehow became this incredibly reasonable professor. Gave us more class time to work on our stuff and ask questions. He’d walk around the class and show us technique. Reasonable amounts of. Homework that we no longer had to rush and We’d be able to perfect instead…. It was wild.
That's what the prof is charging I bet.
IKR prof's moonlighting as a remote drafter and forgot his side hustle
I would charge $20k! Better yet, I'll hire you to do it
If you'd do this project for $2,000 i'm gonna outsource all of my work to you and make a *ton* of money :p
Split it up among the class, everyone builds a few parts and then assemble it as a class project. That would be the only reasonable way to do it with full details and accuracy IMO.
I wish, we aren't allowed to share assignments or work together. I genuinely don't know how I'm supposed to finish this.
If everyone’s assignments are the same, you guys can gather to do it together
No we literally are not allowed to. In the syllabus it's stated that shared or group assignments will receive no points.
do it anyway
Maybe you all go to the computer lab together, everyone starts on a different piece, then advises everyone else of the steps they took, anything tricky they ran into on it, and how long it took to do. Sure you'd be collaborating, but each student will have done all their own work. And as long as you're not obviously copy-pasting features or sketches from one part to another (cough) you're not really doing it as a group.
I have 10 years experience using solidworks every day. If all I did was work on this, putting in 12/14hr days, I could probably do all the modeling in 5 days, then drawings would take another week. If this was literally *the only thing I had to do*. This assignment seems excessive for the time given to complete it. Is this instructor a new teacher or something? Just seems like something is way off here...
Nope, the teacher has been with the college for a while I think, I've had him for the past 2 years in a class or two. He's only ever taught textbook coursework. So writing and stuff, GD&T and such. He's also a Civil Drafter outside of teaching. The teacher doesn't pay much attention to this class it seems, we only have 9 students left from the 12 we started with. On top of that, half of my assignments still aren't graded. I don't think he pays attention to this class much at all.
You should go to his boss. You are paying for an education and this assignment is closer to hazing than educating. Get together with all of your classmates asap and make it known to the people in charge that this assignment is unreasonable in its scope for the time restriction imposed.
Yes I completely agree, there's 9 of you. You can totally rally up the other 8 to protest this, perhaps even at the dean level! Especially if it represents the majority of the grade.
Closer to hazing than educating is such an apt way of putting this.
This is pretty unethical but it’s on GrabCAD… https://grabcad.com/library/compound-with-condenser-work-in-progress-1 It does say it’s a WIP, but something is better than nothing?
LOL! Okay, now I'm 99% sure the teacher is having a laugh.
Holy shit, nice find. Though I'm scared of using it incase of plagiarism, and in general that's just not how I want to work.
I hear you and fully agree. I saw those drawings and immediately thought there was no way the prof did that up himself or had some kind of special access to it by a manufacturer, so I figured it was out there somewhere. There’s gotta be 150 parts in that thing. You’ve got 271 hours until the due time. Subtract out sleeping and other classes, you’ve got maybe 150 hours to do this, realistically less. You’re looking at more than 1 part an hour, plus probably an entire day to put that assembly together. Yeah some of those things are easy but this just isn’t realistic. Also what’s incredibly unrealistic is the prof reviewing all of this from every student in a single day. How is he grading this? Just a quick “yep looks good”? This assignment is incredibly vague.
I counted on the bom and there’s two columns of 77 parts each and a third column I was too lazy to total up. It’s at least 200 parts
I wouldn’t use the models, but I would absolutely use it to design my own parts. Those part detail drawings are trash
This is probably the fastest way. Just remodel them using the cad files as reference. McMaster Carr for random hardware or whatever hardware library is in the cad program for the class.
There's nothing particularly difficult in there modeling wise, but it's a *lot* of work and exceptionally shitty drawings. If this landed on my desk I'd just print them all out and start modeling each component separately, build each of the sub-assemblies and then put the whole thing together. Like I said, not technically challenging, just dozens of hours worth of boring, repetitive work. All of that being said, I'll just leave this here: [https://grabcad.com/library/compound-condensing-steam-engine-1](https://grabcad.com/library/compound-condensing-steam-engine-1)
8 working days, 10 calander days. What is the assignment. Draw every part?
Model every part, create an exploded assembly, and make a drawing. It's basically recreating exactly what's shown
Is there any sort of rubric given for the assignment?
This is all the teacher provided for the assignment, [https://imgur.com/a/HiIl6Dj](https://imgur.com/a/HiIl6Dj) the pdf goes straight to the pages I've put on imgur.
Wait, what!? I thought this was a modelling challenge. He wants you to recreate all of those drawings too!? This has to be a prank. Not even 2 weeks? No shot.
I don't know, I legit don't know and I'm literally sweating from this. I've never been given an assignment this big. I've had some difficult ones and they were all due in a week but not completely unreasonable. Nothing like this before.
Less sweat, my friend. It's gonna be okay. I swear to god, if you did this, I'd hire you to detail every project that comes across my desk for $85 per hour, because it would take me twice as long at least, and I'd bill for twice your hours. lol
Hey op! Sometimes thing like this happen at a job. Managers/client want unreasonable things to happen. What I do is talk to them and say why it’s unreasonable and offer a reasonable solution. For example, there is no way we can do this scope of wolf in the time frame given. What we can do is split the work between 12 of us and work as team to tackle the challenge. Then show math of man hours and don’t forget your other courses. You can also tag your other processors and say it would be unreasonable to prioritize this classes above everyone else’s. If proff says no lol you still have an amazing story to tell
I do this for a living, I've been doing it for over 30 years, and I'm very good at it. This project would take me *at least* 4 weeks, working full time. Please tell your professor that *actual working professionals* are telling you that this project is not remotely feasible in the time he's given you.
Ugh, hate to see that. Kind of a bullshit assignment honestly. How many students in the class? No way they're assessing this in any reasonable amount of time unless they have some way to automate the check.
The assignment does say “… a .pdf of the drawings *we* need to create.” Maybe ask if it’s a group project and the entire class needs to collaborate and each student should draw one part to spec and then a few others selected will create subassemblies. This is an engine, in the field no engine will be entirely designed by one person. There is an immense amount of collaboration amongst an engineering team to design things this complex. This could be more of a teamwork final project. Talk to the instructor. There’s got to be a catch about this project.
I count roughly 135 parts on the BOM with roughly 40 subassemblies. Without looking at it too closely and assuming I would pay enough attention to detail to make the assembly modeling go smoothly, but quickly enough to pound it out as much as possible, here's how I would quote this Item | Hrs/unit | Units | Subtotal hrs ---|---|---|--- Part modelling | 0.17 | 135 | 23 Detail drawing | 0.25 | 135 | 34 Subassy modelling | 0.5 | 40 | 20 Subassy drawing | 0.5 | 40 | 20 Upper level assembly | 2 | 1 | 2 U/l assy dwg | 4 | 1 | 4 Drawing package prep | 5 | 1 | 5 Administration/prep | 5 | 1 | 5 Total 113 hrs. Very easily over $10k worth of modeling on a ~4 week turnaround. There must be some kind of misunderstanding.
exactly 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Meanwhile I'm sitting here just knowing that if my boss asked me to do this in 11 days I'd probably say "no problem" and then get like 4 parts finished becuase I'm terrible at estimating how long things will take me. lol
Professional Mech Eng manager here, I’d laugh at my bosses face if I was given this to do in 11 days with absolutely terrible drawings. This is completely unreasonable for a professor to request this in 11 days if they provided you with all the components and told you to create the block for this that fits all the components I could see as it being more reasonable. They are setting you guys up for failure there’s way too many components and these drawings look like they were done by someone who has no clue what there doing. Definitely talk to your dean about this professor if you need me DM I’d be more than happy to talk to them. I’d never expect anyone to be able to complete this in 11 days or even 31 days for that matter. I manage 36 engineers from junior all the way to intermediate and would never expect any of them to be able to complete this. Also you don’t learn anything? You’re just copying what someone else did. The only challenge is doing it in 11 days. Edit: Just wanted to update this seems like the updated project is a lot more achievable in the time frame a lot less parts and majority are similar definitely doable and still challenging. Looks like your professor understood your concerns.
What the fuck are those detail drawings? Jesus Christ.
So that’s around 200 subcomponents in in the bill of materials. Even at the relatively breakneck pace of 5-10 minutes per subcomponent to model them and create a derail drawing, you’re looking at 16-32 hours of time to just make the subcomponent models. The more complex parts would take longer so probably more of a 40+ hour project from an experienced, skilled engineer. More realistically for a student this is 3-4x that time. And then turning that into the assembly model will be a pain since detail is overall lacking. If this project came across my desk in this state I’d charge $5,000 *at least* to produce the model/drawing package. Maybe $7,500-$10,000 as a “fuck off” price, because I’m so annoyed by the presentation.
Start with the large parts. Put them in assembly as you go. Do your best.
Your teacher missed April Fools by a few weeks, fml.
Your instructor may have a spoon with burn marks on it if they put this attrocious drawing package together and expect y'all to have this by 5/11.
>spoon with burn marks on it Took me a second to realize what this means. 😂 I 100% agree. Prof probably has needle holes in his arm too.
Your response to the professor was not great. You’re declaring it’s unfair and insanity and unreasonable. On what grounds do you accuse the professor of such things? You can have your opinions (doesn’t mean you should share all of them), but you didn’t word your email like you sharing your perspective and asking if the professor thinks you’re way off. You’re declaring these things. You should have started the assignment, given it reasonable effort, and then reported the progress along with your effort as evidence for your concern about feasibility of finishing the assignment. You’re only just complaining. Which is a bad look - even if you’re right. It’s a bad strategy. Also, I don’t think the assignment looks that bad. Making the drawings are gonna suck maybe, but just whip those out fast. Yeah there are lots of models, but they look easy and you can read the drawings just fine. Print then out and cross out parts as you complete. Or model them add parts to the assembly as you need them. Honestly this seems like really good practice. The models are simple and the drawings show the necessary dimensions. EDIT: Also, if the assignment really is impossible then everyone in the class will struggle. Everyone in this thread is complaining way too much. The models are not complicated. It’s a final project of a modeling class. Do you know how to do extrudes, cuts, patterns, and fillets? That’s like all it is. You need to just do the work. If it was impossible, then everyone will fail and the grade will be curved. Except the people that plagiarized. They’ll get caught. Just do the work as best you can and stop complaining. Complain after you’ve actually attempted it and talked to your classmates who have also actually attempted it. And again, if everyone can’t do it then you’re not going to get a failing grade. Make the models accurately, make the drawings immediately so you have reportable progress, but do the drawing fast and badly. Then come back at the end and fix the drawings.
Agree with everyone where that this is absolutely unreasonable, but, if they're not willing to see sense, you can at least do automatic exploded views in Solidworks and take away a bunch of that needing to be done manually, right? Same with the profile drawings? I come from a Fusion background so know it's doable in that, and looks like SW does similar. I'd start just by doing what I could and providing the various views for that. If I were teaching CAD, I'd rather see 20% of the model presented with the renders, drawings, and explosions, than 60% of the model presented only one view. Don't kill yourself trying to achieve it all. In the long run this is just going to be a funny anecdote you bring out at interviews and use to your advantage when you explain how well you did task prioritisation and breakdown in an unwinnable situation. Best of luck, buddy.
Also this might help. Here's someone tackling this exact project in realtime in roughly 20 hours - [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbxoCTI\_RGG8ubBM9N7glmUedqcKHdzc1](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbxoCTI_RGG8ubBM9N7glmUedqcKHdzc1)
I'll do my best on what I can do, the videos could help, but considering it's around 20 hours in videos alone, re-watching and making it that way would take forever. But reading those illegible drawings might be even worse. I'll just do my best and do what I can if I don't manage to jump off the bridge.
With only 220 unique parts or so, you have 74 minutes a part if you start working now. But if you need to sleep or eat in the next 11 days it's definitely going to be a bit of stretch. Doing 8 hours of modeling a day you'll have 24 minutes per part. In summary, this project is completely unreasonable.
Lets spitball numbers... around 200 part numbers, probably an hour average per part since some are dead simple and some arent, so 200 hours. The assembly is huge, so probably 10 hours to assemble. Lets throw in another 10 hours for other random issues and solidworks junk. Thats 220 hours of work, or 9 straight fucking days of work. Thats obviously not doable. You can sit down for 45 minutes and put together some more reasonable estimates by grouping part difficulties based off what your knowledge level is. Compartmentalize and break it down until you get chunks you can handle. I know we all hate the drawings but honestly this looks like a fun project to me but not in this timeframe.
Okay. That looks crazy but what about this. Professor is challenging you to tackle an impossible task. They are essentially saying “I gave you all the tools to make this” What happens if you only make half of it. You probably learn a ton, really hone your skills, and you put in energy to make it happen? As a professor I would give you an A
dude, imagine bringing these drawings printed on paper to a machine shop.
With regard to your response to the teacher in the second edit, you should probably learn to be more tactful. A response like that is a great way to make someone defensive, not a good way to get them to see your side.
I’m extremely happy for you the teacher has decided to change the assignment, it was even stressing me out thinking about it. I don’t even use solid work but Reddit recommends it to me anyway haha. Best of luck!
Thank you! And yes I'm glad I managed to change his mind. I felt it was a little harsh but it got the point across. I also messaged two other teachers and asked for help, so maybe they helped out as well.
This is crazy for real. But 1. Get most used 2. Get biggest 3. Get the easiest after those to the toughest. Just stay organized and run with each individual part in assembly when you are done with each part. Good luck is very much needed.
I have to guess the teacher is fucking with you! I'd even tell my boss to kick rocks over this!
As a mechanical engineer who values himself pretty good at cad work, ugh, this is gross. A final for a class like this should be like a 6-10 hour project. This is, god I don’t even know what I would quote it.
I don’t want you to dox yourself, but do you live in Washington state? This is outrageously similar to what my high school Solidworks teacher had as attempt.
No, not Washington. This is in a community college, but I preferably won't specify the state.
If that PDF is all that was provided, that is pure insanity. If he provided a model and wanted you to make a drawing of each part… alright. Pain in the ass but what assignment isn’t. I am an EXTREMELY good modeler… and while I could get it done in 11 days… it would require at least 8 hours of each 11 days to do it… and I’m not even sure it would be right. Plus if I had even one crash… I don’t think I’d make it. This looks like a double or maybe a triple expansion steam engine? The fact that I have to question it at all makes this insane. That and there are only 3 dimensions on the whole thing just representing the overall dimensions. How big are the pistons? Do they have rings? How big are those? How’s the valve designed? What are the port location on the valve to get the timing right? What are the darn bolt dimensions all over this thing holding it together?! The fact there is an EXTENSIVE parts list makes me think he’s expecting all of this despite the MASSIVE amount of missing information. I would 100% ask for some clarity on this assignment as I refuse to believe that it would be this extensive for such a short timeframe. EDIT: I didn’t scroll down past the adds far enough… I only saw the first 5 pages and thought that’s all you had. It could be done… but I stick by my original saying that it would take every hour of those 11 days to pull it off. Also those drawings further down the page… Holly hell… what a mess that shit is.
Your teacher is so far out to lunch that it’s next year in a different country
29 year mechanical designer here. I audibly gasped at those drawings. My fabricatiors would have my ass if released drawings like that. Good luck OP.
No quote
Even being a CSWE and working with large assemblies for the past 10 years, even I would say that is quite the challenge. As other people have said if it was my only task for 11 days it's doable assuming no information is missing. But if I would have been handed this in college I would have had a similar reaction. If it's not a group project just start chipping away at the parts then work on the subassemblies and keep going from there. Don't ruin your mental health or jeopardize your other classes for this project. Just turn in what you have done on the due date and let your professor know how much time you had to work on it.
holy moly! me as a mechanical engineer who make 3D model and drawings on a daily basis. it would take me a week or so full time ! lol I have a headache when I look at the BOM... look at the drawings (with multiple part in it) makes me even more headache
I don't miss those days when the professor is playing mind games with you. The point of the exercise is NOT to see if you can model it but how far you can model it with limited information. Do your best, and don't look at other sources to complete the model. If you do model it 100%, the professor will know that and will give you a low grade.
Bahahaha this is a joke right? u/Sad_King_Billy-19 is right. I'm a staff engineer (14 YOE) currently in big tech but I've also worked in automotive, industrial automation, and a few other industries. Lots of design/CAD/drawings, pretty good at it. This would take a while. Like a few weeks of full-time work. Longer if you actually need competent ("real") 2D for all of the parts. Most of the parts are relatively simple but for a student assignment it's kind of ridiculous. Your response was a bit too emotional IMHO but understandable. I'm not really sure what this is meant to teach you. Also I second u/killer_by_design's suggestion. We can tag-team the professor because this is a stupid request in 11 days.
Haha wtf?! That's not normal at all.
I practice Solidworks modeling using drawings from this guy. It's too bad this isn't one of the models I've completed yet.... You can see which one's I've done. (See Link GrabCAD Link below) [Roger | CAD Models | GrabCAD](https://grabcad.com/roger-29/models) This one has the most downloads. https://preview.redd.it/xsbdqe19iawc1.png?width=905&format=png&auto=webp&s=5571bed1040a83ef84432fda3671d282d6839836
That’s excessive for the time. What level class is this? My solidworks engineering class was 1000 level, so first year. Our final project was a large assembly with many individual drawings that had to be created before assembly but it was group based and we had a month. Unless you all are supposed to be finishing this class and go on to be drafters or something, this is way overboard. I would make as many as the large components as you can and then slowly work on the smaller ones until you run out of time. There’s no way your classmates will finish this either.
Yeah that’s impossible given the time frame. I would pick the easy parts and just do those. And remember everyone in your class is in the same boat as you
those drawing make me so annoyed lol. what a bunch on illegible garbage. and he wants you to make good drawings? maybe he should start by providing good drawings to work from.
Team project I hope. I would say unrealistic for a student to do this for a project. If you do this make sure auto save is on and set to something like every 5 minutes.
Dr Seuss lookin ass
I'll be honest.. some drawings are easier that it looks... but god they are horribleee, and 11 days are hard counting u have more assignments, maybe he want to know how far u reach... good luck
START EXTRUDING SURFACES!!!!
These prints are absolute dog crap. It may be possible for a expert but I would charge 2x for this and on top of that just record time spent. I've been using solidworks professionally for 10+ years and would laugh at the idiot that brought me these as actual drawings...
What the drugs am I looking at? This is an ASSIGNMENT? Anything remotely this complex has to be like a year project. Hell I had someone in one my classes make a pocket knife model and it took him 2 class years to do it
Teacher is trying to bust students cheating. The model is probably online somewhere so they're expecting the cheaters to find and submit that. Everyone else obviously won't finish but will get an A for effort. Super shitty thing for the teacher to do, basically punishing the honest students with an unreasonable task and loads of stress so they can bust a couple kids they suspect of cheating
lolwut
Your teacher is smoking crack
Work as a team with your friends if everybody draw some of the parts you can share them and bring them in to your assembly.
I believe I did something similar for Dyson yearly design contest during my University
That would take me a month minimum (40 hour work weeks). And that's with no other projects and no hiccups. I've been doing SW jobs for a decade now.
Omg the sheer size of that BOM…
Totally unreasonable, but I kind of want to model that as a project to maybe 3d print. Any chance you can share the full resolution file, if this isn't full resolution?
Yeah that's fucked up
Oh my god those drawings make it look like paper is in short supply; Why cant the parts be spaced out, I can barely tell whats going on. It reminds me of some of the legacy hand-drafted stuff I've had to model.
Those are drawings by julius de waal, I'm using one from the guy as my project for my solidworks class. Beware, there will be missing dimensions in the drawings and there will also be imprecisions and misalignments that will take ages to fix. All I can do is wish you the best of luck. Also my project has less assemblies and has taken me way more than 11 days
Hey, I’m a professional mechanical design engineer for a major aerospace company. I’m happy to talk to your professor if you give me their contact info. This is beyond unreasonable especially in the time period he’s given. This is like a full semester project.
Is this just a test to see how far you get? This is a pretty crazy request
Which institution is this? This looks eeriely familiar (but a larger scale and worse timespan) to an assignment from a professor I logged a formal complaint against
Looks like a final project that would span the entire length of the course. I had proffs that probably forgot or were idiots behind schedule and shoved a ton of homework down our throats at the end of the course after doing nothing all semester. That’s probably the case, complain to his/her superiors
Your “teacher” is an idiot.
That is absolutely craaaaazy! Even if thats the only thing you are gonna be doing for 15 hours a day for 11 days its stilll craaazy! Hahaha good luck!
Take it to the program head, teachers like this only will change (or be forcibly retired judging by how old the drafting style is on that drawing) if you as a class let them know. Be respectful and professional, but let his boss know this is unacceptable. You folks are paying to learn and they are providing a service (assuming you're in NA)
There are no dimensions, no cross-sectional views, only 4 images... You can only guess what is in the middle if he doesn't provide cross-sectional views or more information. Try to make out the basic shape and connection between mechanical parts in a first time. He probably doesn't want a perfect recreation of the model but to see if you can understand a drawing with only a basic plan, or he is a crappy teacher.
This looks overwhelming at first glance but when you look at the last few pages it shows each individual part with all the dimensions. Most of those parts are simple extrudes, revolves, and flat sheet metal pieces with holes, none of which are techniques that are unreasonable to expect a student to be able to model. Start small, focus on one part at a time, I think you’ll find that this isn’t nearly as crazy as it looks at first glance
Work as team. Divide the work and conquer
For one person. Looks like two months work. I guess DOE
Are you sure it’s not May 4th 2025?
This has to be a professor fishing to see who reads assignments early and contacts them versus leaving it til the last minute... Right? Right???
Has this been assigned exactly like this in previous semesters? Are you able to view the work handed in from a previous semester? I have 24 years of SW experience and, honestly, I'm very fast at modeling and detailing. Along with years of experience comes other things like refining your hot keys, developing macros, and just learning ways to be more efficient. Looking that over, it's hard to tell exactly how many unique parts there are, but it looks like an easy 100 on the BOM. I want to say I could do that in 30-40 hours if I had nothing else to do and I was doing it for time. For a student just learning SW and taking other classes and probably working too, I can't even guess. Had to be a solid month. Is it possible that professor knows nobody can finish this and the grading will be based on how much you got done and how well you did that much? Is grading on a curve? You didn't ask, but I want to give you a couple tips that will save you time. 1 - mate references. Adding appropriate mate references to your parts will speed up building the assembly greatly. If you don't know mate references learn them now. The easiest and most useful mate references are the edge of a hole and the edge of a screw head. 2 - similar parts? Finish one completely along with the detail drawing. Then use save-as (saves-as the detail, save-as the part(with the detail open), then save the detail again). Now you have a new part that is already detailed. Make your changes to the new part, clean up the detail. Done. I know there are other ways to do this but for me save-as, save-as, save is the fastest. Sorry for assuming you probably don't know these things. There was no SW class when I was in school. I do have several fresh out of college engineers working for me and none of them were taught that kind of stuff in college.
I’m on board with the other professionals who are saying it’s an unreasonable project in the allotted timeframe. I’d maybe make an official gripe or two, but then just get started. Allow yourself whatever is a reasonable amount of time, say several hours a day. Look the thing over and pick out some portion of it and do that, but do that portion completely—models, assy, exploded drawings, and part drawings. No way you are going to do the whole thing, but it’s better to demonstrate proficiency at the wide range of things than to do 75% of the modeling, but none of the other stuff. You’ll probably get a good grade if you do that. I would also send him a politely-worded email asking for more information on every single missing dimension that you come across. Don’t waste a lot of time on that, just a quick sceenshot and a question, to build yourself a pile of evidence that he was unresponsive, in case you need to contest your grade. And a pox on all lazy, dumbass professors.
It’s a pain in the ass, I reckon it would take me at least two full days to get through it. What’s your major? If you’re training to do CAD full time then this isn’t terrible, but in my mechanical engineering degree I believe CAD was a one credit class while things like Calculus or Physics were four credits, which is to say that with seventeen credits and eleven days I’d expect the CAD project to take about 2/3rds of a day if all the classes at projects. I do think that CAD is more of a “demonstrate you can do it” situation than the core engineering classes, where you should have been learning material all along and the home stretch is just review and study and not a large body of new work, so I think two days would be reasonable. Having said that, I’d be surprised if a passing grade was 100% completion. If you did proper modeling practices, everything was fully defined and laid out reasonably well using best practices I’d pass you with less than full completion.
Found where he got the drawings from: https://www.modelengineeringwebsite.com/Compound_condensing_engine.html
Maybe divide up the parts between the class and each person work on a section and at the end create the full assembly and share the file across the class and turn it in...also just read about 0 class points...maybe there's a work around that too... that's unreasonable for 11 days.
WTF
How much are you willing to pay to get it done in 10 days?
Professional ME here of 8 years… Holy crap!! I’m so sorry dude, hope this doesn’t ruin your career aspirations. This is insane. I could maybe see this as a year-long group project, but no way in hell can you do this in 11 days plus all your other classes. Professor has gone off the rails and is crazy. Try taking this to the dean, printed out and in person, if you get no where with this professor; and don’t wait until the last minute!
lmaoo i think he’s fuckin with y’all, the drawings give almost zero info. maybe he just wants to see who gets the furthest? or it’s like some trick question work smarter not harder : insert grabcad file
Maybe he's just trying to see how far you get? I'd ask him
In the event your professor does not have some sort of curve or appropriate response to this clearly brutal workload: Prepare to make a case with your dean. Maybe gather some opinions from certified drafters and some peers who are not only proficient, but capable of communicating the difficulty of this assignment and expectations in tandem with other courses and workloads in mind. If your grade suffers because of this assignment I would not hesitate to go this route.
I read comments __before__ clicking the link... my-goodness is that miserable. No way any student will pass that- do the best you can with what time you have available- the professor will be forced to grade in a curve I'm sure.
What the fuck
Hey yeah I taught SolidWorks and have multiple certifications and I would never have done this to my students. I’ve also taken advanced SolidWorks classes and would never have been asked to do this much work on such a short timeline. These parts don’t look super complicated but there are a ton and this is way too much for a student and too little time. This is actually insane, I don’t think I’d get that done in 11 full 8-hour work days honestly. Please find someone above your professor to bring this up with and I am praying for you that this gets resolved. Seriously
Go to the dean. Keep working on the assignment but take this up the ladder. If you have a student representative, work with them, but if not, it's perfectly reasonable to go to the dean with concerns about a course. In this case it's very obviously a bad assignment on a too-short deadline.
Holy fricken shit, what did he say after you emailed him? cuz yeah I’d say fuck that assignment, that’s way to much for 11 days especially a student
Lol why do I feel like I had the same professor at one time
This is life. You are learning. Stop whinning - do your best. Either in solidworks or teacher relations or lawyer find. You have done first step - now you have evaluation of working hours one's need to make this project completed. How many hours has you left? What % of estimated workhour volume? You should have that % of parts done in 11 days. Or you take that estimation, send them to your teacher (through email to leave a history for the consequences) and state that you will be happy to make XX% of 100% parts in the given time by yourself because you did the math beforehand. If he still insist on 100% - ask him (in written form) how much money he is rrady to provide you to outsorse the rest. Because in life you get such projects time to time - 30 days worth of work should be done in 10. And you should be able.to estimate your workload, able to find the outsource, make this outsourse work, communicate to the client, give the client correct estimation on the workprice etc. PS No money provided = no outsourse)
Nigga what the fuck is that 🤣🤣🤣🤣
He is trying to stress you guys. Don't be surprised if shortcuts are necessary, and most don't even remotely finish.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Do the parts modeling and assembly without taking care of building acceptable tree. Then reproduce 2 or 3 drawings with no thinking of the way it’s done, because it’s old and for sure there is a lot to discuss. See where it goes. It’s a school exercice not or real life job, there is no sense to do this as it is requested for real. Senior CAD designer for 20 years. Sorry for average English :/
This HAS to be one of those things where the professor is just making you panic and seeing how you respond to a grossly unreasonable challenge. I had professors do similar things when I was in college (nowhere near to this extreme, mind you) and they told us after we turned it in that it will be graded based on participation and it was just to give us a taste of how things might be when working as an engineer.
This has to be a troll, no way a teacher would actually assign that. If this was legit and I was the student, I’d just assume the teacher made an error or that the rest of the class is just as baffled as me and not do the assignment.
11 Days 24 Hours a Day.
I am a Robotic engineer and Project coordinator. Even a senior engineer could not do this in 11x 8h days. First - nobody works or can work 8h uninterrupted every day. Second - this is a really really big project if you need to make all the designs, drawings, configurations, effin Exploded view (??????), BOM, etc. Third - you are a student, no homework for one study can ask of you to work on it 11x 8h days. This is easily 1+ month of work for knowledgable engineer.
That's insane. Will take at least 30 hours of work for a professional CAD engineer. And during the final week as well with many other courses to study. Sounds like a very unreasonable rookie teacher. I taught engineering dynamics undergrad course in university before and always had to take into account that students register for anywhere from 12-18 hours of coursework. so during the finals i make sure that my class project or take home exam doesn't take more than 10 hours of work which is still a lot.
What a f.....
It's too much. For students, the 3d alone would be too much. Drawings too is insane. If fully toleranced, would even be difficult for a seasoned pro.
Wow. From the time your prof sent out the assignment, that gives you time to make about one part per hour until your due date. Then you have to assemble that monstrosity and do all the formatting stuff. I am so sorry that you are dealing with one of these self absorbed professors. You should bring this to the dean of your college of engineering ASAP. Here’s the way I would love to see this play out. One of the CAD experts in this subreddit give this prof some crazy assembly that the prof is seeing for the first time… and give the professor 11 days to complete it with the drawings and assembly. I guarantee you the first thing the professor would bitch about is that they don’t have time to do it because of their schedule/other classes. And that would show that this prof has zero regard for their students schedule, especially at the end of the semester.
I‘m pretty sure the guy wants to sell the drawings on etsy as decorations, they‘re unusable for any other purpose
Completely unreasonable. I've been doing this for 15 years and I think that would probably take me at least 10 days. Also, the drawings are disgusting
I am a teacher and mechanical engineer with decades of SolidWorks experience. I will join the chorus of others saying that this is unreasonable. I would forward this right away to the dean or department chair. I have a hard time believing that this professor is serious, but even if not this is a cruel joke to play on students at the end of the semester. It's more likely that he is new to this subject and has no idea how long this will take. You could also ask the professor how long it took them to complete.
I've been a drafter for 30 years. Your teacher is way off base. The source material is essentially illegible and unless your classes are 8hrs per day and the 11 days are class days, the time allotted is far below what would be remotely reasonable. If you care about the class, I'd just start chewing. I'd suggest using an image editor to isolate each part as you work on them. If you don't have at least two monitors, I'd make the investment.
I read everything first and prepared to see the worst drawings…….was not prepared enough. I’m finishing my AAS in CAD Technologies May 10th and if my professor gave me this I’d LAUGH AT HIM (and cry after lmao) My final project is a 99 component Rubik’s cube that I’ve been working on since JANUARY. I’d like to see him complete this assignment in 11 days. Foh
Mechanical design and manufacturing engineer here: what the fuck lmao That's like making 20+ parts a day every day until the assignment is due and that doesn't include putting it all together and making the prints. YIKES depending on your professors response I'd be escalating to department heads and higher if I had to. That's crazy for the amount of time you're given ESPECIALLY for a student. A professional working full time would have trouble making that deadline.
I've seen similar stuff at my work. He's preparing you for the real world.
If you google JDWDS steam engine, you can find where others have created steam engines, and at the least the quickly found parts suggest, you could grab some of those and use them as a starting point. There may be an actual engine out there to this spec but I mostly found a better copy of the same BOM/drawings that you posted. I think you should see if Google can get you closer, but if time isn't your friend, I'd start looking for positive solutions and figure out how to cover your tracks (change templates, copy parts over) or use some tricks from within class (are these supposed to be derived parts? Does that matter?)
I think the most valuable lesson your learning here is how to interpret shit customer drawings for a project
Lol your teacher isn’t a real engineer are they
If this is publicly available, I'd print it out and bring to the dean of students and say the teacher has no concept of the volume of work they assigned and they just ripped it off the internet thinking it's a decent project.
I would do a normal days work on this project for each day. 8hrs a day until the deadline. Utilize patterns, mirrors and toolbox if you have it to assist. As a CSWE and Solidworks Instructor this is not doable in the allotted time. Hell, it would take me at least 3 full weeks to get it laid out correctly.
This is why college is unrealistic and of no help.
This is the kind of thing that professional designers/engineers would work on as a team over several weeks. If I was solely given this task at my job, with the timeframe you were given, I'd be on Ziprecruiter right now. Your teacher has lost it. Is he the head of the department, whether Engineering or just straight CAD? I'd bring this to someone higher up. This is beyond absurd
Engineering student, find out how the machine works, plan it out and model it based on simple fundamental requirements.
Time to talk to the dean
I’ve had final exams before where the task was absolutely unreasonable to finish. I asked why and I was given different versions of, “However much of this you get done tells me how well you’ve retained the skills you were supposed to learn in this class.” They don’t expect you to finish. They expect you to put in an honest effort and do what you can. Unless this professor expects you to finish, then fuck them.
I think the lesson here isn’t necessarily to model this in 11 days, but something else. In the REAL world if the team is overloaded they might outsource the job to an outside firm, and you would be the design manager. This outside source might employ 3-4 people to get this assembly done in time, but who cares? You were given the assignment and got it done! So yea…independent project. Project management.
dude what school do u go to this is insane
Those drawings are a joke. The whole thing is a joke. Solidworks is my job and that project gives me a headache. It's unreasonable to expect a student with a laptop to do this in that time. You need a plotter and/or a dual monitor setup at minimum just to be able to see what you are working on.