<p>Having an Engineering degree may pave the way for an awesome career, but one of the coolest aspects of having one (at least to me) is the amount of things it can be used for outside of the workplace, on ones own personal time. What non-career/job related scenarios have you guys used your engineering knowledge for, whether it'd be a DIY project, fixing or modifying something, building your own devices, whatever. Also state what your discipline is.</p>
<p>You can use freshman physics to explain why someone could have trouble loosening the lug nuts/bolts on the car wheel to change a flat tire. Then you can encourage such a person to make use of physical education to ensure that s/he has the capability of loosening the lug nuts/bolts on the car wheel. Or use the same physics to explain why s/he should have a longer lug wrench if s/he is concerned about flat tires and does not want to wait for roadside assistance to come (which often takes a lot longer than changing the wheel yourself).</p>
<p>Simple physics is useful for a fair number of things.
It’s easier to open a warm pickle jar (thermal expansion) and the like, and you can use inertia to get ketchup out of a ketchup bottle(inertia).
There’s also the rather amazing corn starch and water trick.</p>
<p>We wanted to build our own house, back in the mid-1990s. We found a cool design in a house magazine, but it was meant to be located in Ohio. The wind and snow loads are higher on the coast of Maine, so we were able to redesign the roof. We were also able to eliminate a column located in the kitchen. The builder questioned if the long span met building code requirements, so we gave him a letter with my husband’s engineering stamp.</p>
<p>We also designed our log cabin in the western Maine mountains. The logs were milled from trees on our land. We designed some cool trusses that are unusual. That structure is very sturdy - high winds don’t shake it a bit. </p>
<p>My husband just helped our neighbors out with a design for a cantilevered porch. There were some tricky connections to figure out. It’s rewarding to use our knowledge for our own use!</p>
<p>“It’s rewarding to use our knowledge for our own use!”</p>
<p>Definitely! That’s a cool story, something I definitely want to do once I can afford my own home.</p>
<p>I’m still a sophomore so I don’t have a ton of engineering experience yet but I have used some principles from basic science and math classes to work on things. I was working on a makeshift air conditioning unit earlier this summer, I made the whole unit but it’s definitely lacking so I’m back to trying new things to make it more efficient. </p>
<p>Last summer I was building a home gym but didn’t have enough money to go out and buy a bench or squat rack (they’re generally $300 or more), so I bought $40 worth of materials from Lowe’s and built kind of an all-in-one rack for benching, squatting and shoulder pressing. I used some of the stuff I learned from trig and basic force principles from physics and it came out very good; ultra sturdy, quite compact and can support probably more than 400lbs of weight.</p>
<p>I’ve also though of a bunch of ideas for basic electricity generators (nothing groundbreaking, more like steam engine technology, just stuff to get me thinking and tinkering). I still have yet to actually work on making them though. Other than that, I find myself using science and mathematical principles I’ve learned to find creative solutions to even the smallest everyday problems.</p>
<p>By the way, I’ll be going into MechE junior year.</p>
<p>Keep 'em coming!</p>