MiTek Railrider Auto-Height Adjustment

Course or Client

MiTek (St. Louis, Internship)

Completion Date

Summer 2024

Skills

Defining requirements, 3D modeling, PDM, Public Speaking

Challenge: Design mechanisms required for accurate, automated height adjustment of a two foot diameter steel roller weighing over a ton

Who MiTek is

MiTek is aiming to change the way the world builds houses. They strive to do so by making houses stronger and easier to build through offsite construction; which means building components such as floor and roof trusses in a factory and then transporting them to the build site to then be assembled. MiTek enables offsite construction by producing engineered connectors and automated equipment for assembling trusses in factories.

For my internship, I worked on the Automation Core Platform Support (CPS) team in St. Louis, MO. This team of electrical and mechanical engineers works to support the existing catalog of over a dozen machines that MiTek sells in the US by continuously improving their functionality and manufacturability with feedback from customers and the manufacturing team. My office was located in St. Louis and was connected to the manufacturing floor, allowing for easy access to see the physical machines being designed and ask welders and assemblers questions.

Project Context

As a global company, MiTek produces different machines in different countries that have redundant functions. My project was the first part of a larger project to consolidate its large catalog of machinery. The images on the right show the many MiTek machines for the single function of assembly floor trusses.

Reducing this machinery catalog to have fewer redundant machines for each operation in the truss manufacture process achieves:

Reduced Cost through larger-scale manufacturing
Streamlined customer service
Controllable product quality

My role in this project was to help create a standardized floor truss press design for the global market. This involved researching several floor truss presses made by MiTek and competitors to determine the existing methods of assembling wood and nail plates into trusses and comparing each with their pros and cons. Subsequently, it was determined that the best standard for press design would be a slight modification of the floor truss press made in the US, the RailRider Pro. We chose to modify an existing design due to the advantages of lower time and resources required to prove its viability and scale up production.

Existing Design

In this redesign, the global standard had to be able to fulfill all customer preferences and match competitors' capabilities. One specific requirement was automatic height adjustment of the roller. The height of the roller is changed by truss assemblers when different thicknesses of trusses are required.

A sketch of the existing chain drive can be seen on the right. In this current design, the roller height is adjusted by manually turning large bolts the roller shaft is connected to on either side and adjusting the chain tensioning sprocket (lower middle circle seen on the left). Accessing these first requires the removal of several panels. This is time-consuming and greatly lowers the production capability of the customer if they use many different truss thicknesses.

Outline of existing chain drive

<-Roller

Automated Design

Chain drive redesign to allow for constant chain length. The roller sprocket and lower middle sprocket move together.

Design will use 2 Motor-driven Screw Jacks to actuate vertical height control of roller.

Note: I am unable to show the detailed designs and 3D models I produced during my internship, so presented here is a basic ideas that convey the core concept

Conclusions and learnings

This project exposed me to work in an office, cooperating with people across the country and the world through video calls and messaging.

I learned the importance of taking the initiative to learn with any resources that were available, from company knowledge databases and websites, coworkers, and textbooks on engineering subjects like chain drive design. I was also exposed to the different phases of the design process in an industry context.

Another lesson I learned from this project is the importance of communication and ensuring all team members are on the same page. This is especially true for a global project, as different cultures can value different aspects of a product more than others. Frequent, clear communication ensures everyone is prioritizing goals equally.

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