Big ideas, bigger builds

Making a GoKart from scratch

After leaving Mach, I realized I wanted to branch outside of software engineering.

My first project was building a GoKart, from scratch.

Building a GoKart required a ton of different skills:

1. Welding
2. Plasma cutting
3. Power tools (drill press, cutting, saw grinder)
4. Learning how engines, transmissions, drive trains, differentials, gearboxes, and many other things work

As shown in the video above, building the GoKart took around 1 full month—working nights and weekends after my time at Mach.

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Fun fact: I also built what you could call a "mini" tank beforehand... it's a bad idea to jump straight to a massive, welded mega project, so I built something smaller. I designed this mini-tank over the course of a week. It's laser cut out of wood + 3D printed parts. I wanted to later add tracks to it.

Building a 12ft tall steel drill rig

I decided to join Durin mining as their first engineer. In my time there, it was just me and the CEO. I designed and built a drill rig, completely from scratch. The goal was to eventually make a drill that could dig hundreds of feet into the ground and reveal the mineral composition of the ground beneath it. Miners could then take this drill to a bunch of sites, extract the ground to figure out which sites had the most promising mineral composition, then start a full-scale drilling operation there. This process is called "exploration drilling".

My prototype wasn't supposed to be a full-fledged drill that could dig hundreds of feet, but rather, a first step in that direction.

My prototype was 12ft tall, exert ~4000 lbs of downward force, and could drill several feet into the ground.

The first step was to actually design the drill. This CAD process took 3-4 days.

The design constraints:

1. Needed to fit in the back of a pick-up-truck (aka needs to be dissassemblable)
2. Needs to go at least 5 feet into the ground
3. Needs to be designed and built in <2 weeks.
4. I'm the only engineer. Every part I design, I also need to be capable of fabricating.

Below is the design I came up with. The system on the left was the first rig I built, but I realized it was too small, so I ended up building the system on the right.

I built the entire thing out of steel. This project taught me a lot about hydraulics: I used a hydraulic cylinder, hydraulic motor, and hydraulic pump.

Below shows what the final drill looked like.

And here are some photos of me taking it to the desert.