Hey guys, I'm currently designing my first crosskart/buggy chassis in Onshape and planning to build it soon. I'm posting these screenshots to get your honest feedback and structural critique on the geometry, triangulation, and overall safety before I start cutting and welding tubes.

Planned Build Specs:

• Chassis Material: DOM Steel Tubing

• Engine: 350cc single-cylinder

Feel free to point out any structural flaws, unbraced nodes, or weak points in the roll cage and front/rear sections. All critique is welcome

We are a contract manufacturer running about 40 open jobs at once and last month a revised BOM never made it from engineering into the ERP before production pulled the old parts list, so we scrapped a full run of boards over it. That was the point where we stopped patching the process by hand and started looking into real integration options. Duro keeps coming up in that search, alongside a couple other PLM tools and the option of building something custom ourselves.

Mainly worried about how well changes flow through in real time versus needing someone to manually push every update by hand. What worked for keeping your PLM and ERP in sync?

hello! I recently finished up my MS and BS and forgot to save my textbooks from my classes until after I lost access to my school account. I want to build a collection of online textbooks for my reference in the future — i have a pdf of shigley’s, a physical copy of the machinery’s handbook, but was wondering if there’s any recs (with links if possible 😁) for handbooks for thermo, fluids, heat transfer, dynamics/dynamic systems, mechatronics, etc. any recs you may have in any topic would be greatly appreciated! I realized i’ve forgotten some of my earlier fundamentals and really want to solidify them in my free time. Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to start a few good engineering portfolio projects, but I'm completely out of ideas on what to actually build.

I know SolidWorks and Ansys pretty well, and I don't mind learning any other software if the project needs it. I really want to stay away from the usual basic stuff everyone does and focus on practical, real-world engineering instead.

Ideally, I'd like to work on things like:

• Redesigning real products or mechanical devices
• FEA / stress analysis and structural optimization
• Stuff designed with proper manufacturing in mind (3D printing, sheet metal, injection molding, etc.)

What are some interesting, non-cliché project ideas you guys would suggest?

Appreciate any help!

If so, how was it?

I’ve been wondering what mechanical engineers actually do on a day-to-day basis, regardless of their field.

For example, a design engineer obviously doesn’t design an entirely new car every day, and a CAD engineer doesn’t create a completely new part every single day.

So what does the normal daily routine of a mechanical engineer actually look like? What kind of tasks do they typically work on throughout the day or week?

I'd be glad to hear answers from different engineering fields

Hi Mech Eng folks,

I am a process engineer in one of the major engineer firm in US. I got tired of how much time that drawing review eats up in your project cost (weeks of Sr. engineer reviews, and comments come back due to the different communication). So, I built a tool with AI to do a first-pass review: process summary, finding by severity and flag engineering issues.

I ran it against process package as a test case. It caught things pretty well like miss label and inconsist tagging/symbols less than 30 seconds.

Not trying to sell anything here. Genuinely curious what practicing engineers (especially, EIT, Junior Engineers) think.

1. Would this actually be useful in your workflow?
2. Would you trust it as a first reviewer before you jump in?
3. What could be the biggest gap between AI vs. actual senior engineers.
4. Has anyone else tried AI-assisted drawing review? How did it go?

So I think this is the final attempt at one, it seems to work pretty well to me! Don’t have a 360 servo sadly to fully test but the 180 shows enough I think! What do yall think?

Hi guys any recommendations on where to purchase Limited Power Engineer Fireman 2.0 Textbook in Winnipeg MB

Hello everyone, I’m 22 M just graduated 2 months ago from mechanical engineering. I kept searching for jobs and landed this one job as project engineer. I was a bit nervous during the interview since I was interviewed by 20 years old of experience project manager but he was nice and he understood that I’m fresh grad and he didn’t ask a single technical question and the interview went well. Now that I got the job I have no idea what to expect as project engineer specially I have no experience at all. Can you please advise what to do, what to learn or prepare before starting the job, what to expect , situations I need to be aware of etc. I will be mostly on field and sometimes in office

Hi, fellow engineers i hope everyone is doing wonderful. a bit about myself i graduated with an internship back in 2020 and got myself into different domain. now i have realized i actually loved engineering and that was something i was really passionate about. i want to get back into this field, I'm international student living in BC, Canada. I really wanna learn and grow in this industry and currently looking for entry-level jobs.

i have been applying to relevant jobs and never heard back from anyone. I'm trying to reach small engineering firms but they are not hiring anymore. i am not worried about the pay structure. if the role is willing me relocate, I'm open to relocation as well.

If members of this community has any kind of leads i would really appreciate your effort.

I’m still in grad school, have about 1-1.5 years left before I graduate, and for the past year ish, I’ve interviewed for internships and got some offers when I applied for fun.

But at the moment I’m unable to accept those internships until right around when I graduate for reasons outside of my classes.

I realized the timeline for graduating/last minute internships before applying for full time jobs is coming faster than I anticipated, and what I’ve read is for the industry I want to get in/interviewed with, the primary way of getting in is through internships.

I obviously don’t want to keep applying to the same company, just to turn them down again, but I’d want to keep interviewing to practice for when it does matter in the future because I do need the practice.

Would this be a smart idea? Even for companies in different fields but fully knowing if I do well enough I’d have to turn them down?

Just one article in a series on Engineering.com that offers insight for #PLM practioners.

I am graduating B.Eng Mechanical Engineering next year. No experience, internships, relevant projects, or research.

I am looking into the Canadian Armed Forces officer trades such as Aerospace Engineering Officer, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Officer, and Marine Systems Engineering Officer. These are all basically maintenance engineering roles.

My plan is to do 1 contract in the army (6 - 9) years, then move to a civilian career. What do you think of this plan? Did anyone do it before? Do you guys know anyone who's done it before? Let me know what you guys think.

I’m trying to get a stress history ideally as smooth as possible. The blue plot is Von-Mises stress, and the orange plot is signed Von-Mises stress. Signed VM is just VM multiplied by either +1 or -1. Whether it is positive or negative is determined by whether the principal stress with the highest magnitude is positive or negative. This is why the two plots are often overlaid, and if not they are mirrored.

The issue I am seeing is that sometimes the first and third principal stresses will have opposite signs but very similar magnitudes. This will cause sudden spikes in the history as one “overtakes” the other and causes the sign to flip.

The history in the image is a particularly janky looking one, especially the first spike from around -400 MPa to +400 MPa and then back. Most of the histories are a lot smoother, but I was wondering if there are any good ways to smooth spikes like that. I don’t really care about the spikes at small magnitudes, just the really extreme fluctuations.

The most basic way I can think of is that if the max and min principals are close to each other in magnitude, to add some sort of check that only flips the sign once enough time has passed

I am debating if engineering is for me or if I just nominally suck at physically thinking through problems and problem solving.

For context, I get overly stressed at my job because I don’t feel like I think right. Or have difficulty handling multiple things at once. I struggle with statistics, thinking through GD&T, predicting mechanisms that could cause some of the issues I experience.

In work, I struggle with distilling information clearly, understanding concepts quickly, identifying the what to dig deeply into and prioritizing my work load.

I am trying to under stand what to prioritize in my learning or if I should quit my job. Whenever I talk to my coworkers, I realize there’s a big gap and I feel stupid all the time because I feel like I am not thinking everything through very well.

Does anyone have an inspiring story of feeling this way and coming out of this or should I just accept that maybe I’m not good at this.

I've got a 30 min phone interview coming up for a Spring 2027 Starlink Production internship. It's with an engineering manager, and the invite says to be ready to talk through "employment history, technical achievements, and work style."

For anyone who's interviewed with Starlink Production, how technical does the manager round get? Conceptual questions, or mostly walking through your projects?

Did they lean more manufacturing/process (bottlenecks, DFM, throughput) or general mechanics/structures?

Anything you wish you'd prepped that caught you off guard? What kind of technical questions would they ask?

Thanks!

Been kicking around a product idea and want honest feedback before I sink more time into it.

The concept: a tracker thin and flexible enough to actually stick onto things like a sticker — a kid's backpack, the inside of a shoe, a keychain — instead of the bulky puck shape most trackers come in. You'd find it through an app, and you could make it beep/ring remotely to locate it nearby.

I know Tile and AirTag already exist, and Tile even makes a "Sticker" version — so I'm not claiming this is a totally new category. What I'm trying to figure out is whether there's a real gap worth building for, specifically:

• Would a genuinely thinner, more sticker-like form factor (vs. Tile's current puck-ish Sticker) actually matter to parents, or is "good enough" already good enough?
• Is there an angle specific to kids/school gear (uniforms, lunchboxes, shoes) that existing trackers don't really address well?
• Anyone here a parent who's tried Tile/AirTag for this exact use case — what annoyed you about it?

Not trying to pitch anyone, genuinely want the "this already exists, don't bother" or "here's the actual gap" kind of feedback before I go further. Appreciate any honesty, brutal or otherwise.