I need your help deciding on my ME senior project

[kronus]

Make a helicopter.

[bwanac]

you need to step out of the box of e30 i think... it seems to be limiting you.

if you are going to design a product per se for your car then go through the whole process. for example a strut brace. record everything from start to finish. what is your goal... how will you reach it. material choices. finishes. how to improve time and cost of machining it. easy of installation. in my opinion usability is often overlooked. build some prototypes. test them out (get numbers, load cells, strain gages, model it in whatever software (thermal, mechanical stress, cycling)). improve on it. use all the resources at your school... try to get some accelerate thermal cycling, mechanical cycling... whatever you have time for. in the end you may have something you can actually consider producing which should be fairly impressive.

lots of rambling... the base of it is... you can take a simple project and really flesh it out if you get down to all the little details and cover everything.

[TwoJ's]

you need to step out of the box of e30 i think... it seems to be limiting you.

if you are going to design a product per se for your car then go through the whole process. for example a strut brace. record everything from start to finish. what is your goal... how will you reach it. material choices. finishes. how to improve time and cost of machining it. easy of installation. in my opinion usability is often overlooked. build some prototypes. test them out (get numbers, load cells, strain gages, model it in whatever software (thermal, mechanical stress, cycling)). improve on it. use all the resources at your school... try to get some accelerate thermal cycling, mechanical cycling... whatever you have time for. in the end you may have something you can actually consider producing which should be fairly impressive.

lots of rambling... the base of it is... you can take a simple project and really flesh it out if you get down to all the little details and cover everything.

No, that's not rambling at all. This is exactly what we are required to do. That is why it takes us the whole school year to complete. It's funny you recommended that though, I was actually considering doing a rear strut brace, or a custom sway bar package. Load cells and strain gages along with an accelerometer were exactly what I had planned on using for testing.