A lot of the goals of this 2nd generation design focused on achieving scalability, modularity, and repeatability. This was also one of our first major projects where we aimed to leverage vendor engineering/design resources to increase our overall capabilities. This took new trust and vigilance on top of my can-do attitude and execution skills.

With this project, I was able to include some of our newer design team members in on the work as well as upper management. I wanted to work with them on decision making and process so that we could build trust and more importantly, understanding of the design skillset. It was important to me for leadership to learn how to participate with us, so that design could start to carry more weight moving forward, and not just be this thing that a couple of us did on the side.

With the push for scalability and precision on this project, we had to do a lot more work on part inspection/quality control and process development/documentation. I worked with the vendor on 1st article builds, verifying our mechanical designs and assembly process plans. This work resulted in the modification of CAD, tooling, composite layup schedules, and hardware specifications. I even built a custom kit of tools for our in-house tech team to have on hand when working on the assembly. Eventually the entire package was able to be handed off to our manufacturing team and go on to a production run of 300 kits.