Students Lift Standards

Elliott Equipment Company in Omaha, Nebraska, has a mission to “create the best solutions for lifting and positioning people and materials.” Recently, the company encountered a problem that needed addressing: their method of painting boom sections on carts was inefficient in terms of time and resources.

To tackle this challenge, a team of four senior engineering students—Luke Albright, Mason Price, Caleb Dietz, and Dylan Aukes—took on the project as part of their capstone design course.

“Currently, they are laying booms on carts, which means they need to be flipped and touched up later,” explains Albright, the team’s project manager. “Our project was to create a cart that rotated the boom sections without restricting paint coverage.” This meant redesigning the entire cart system to improve both efficiency and paint quality.

The final solution involved two custom carts, one for each end of the boom. Each cart is equipped with a specially designed jack that expands to secure the boom from the inside. “This is a unique solution because we had to design a custom jack to fit the various boom section sizes,” says Albright.

As project manager, Albright had to divide responsibilities within the team based on each member’s strengths. “Mason worked for STI as a manufacturing engineer intern last summer, which taught him skills in how parts should be installed for ease of assembly. Dylan has a lot of experience with 3D printing and working in Inventor, which Elliott uses, so he did a lot of the custom jack design. Caleb communicated with the client and worked on the ordered parts,” he says.

Throughout the project, the team worked closely with Elliott Equipment staff to ensure their design met the project goals. “Working with Brad Weber and Brandon Kielisch from Elliott was significant in developing our project and creating our jack prototype,” says Albright. “We met with them every two weeks to review our progress and design decisions."

Price says his academic background played a significant role in preparing him for the project. “Machine Design, the introduction to SolidWorks class, and Mechanics of Materials were especially helpful,” he says. “Machine Design helped with picking nuts, bolts, and a threaded rod. Machine Design taught the basics of modeling, and Mechanics of Materials gave us the fundamentals of bending, which we used a lot in the project.”

According to Dr. Ben Saarloos ('99), associate professor of engineering and faculty adviser for the project, senior engineering design projects like this give students more than technical skills. It also provides opportunities to apply their education in a meaningful, real-world context. “The primary goal is a chance to apply the skills and tools they have learned over the past three years,” he says. “But it’s also an opportunity to get a sense of the complexities and pressures of engineering problems outside the classroom, while also seeing that what they have learned has prepared them to take on these challenges with the support of experts and their engineering design team.”

The team says the project did just that. Not only did they refine their design, but they also gained experience in managing time and working together. “I also recognized the value of collaborative problem-solving and how diverse perspectives can strengthen the development process,” says Aukes.

For the student team, the project was, overall, a rewarding experience. “I am most proud of our jack functioning as intended with minimal changes being necessary from the first prototype,” says Albright. “This project was also especially rewarding because our design will be used daily by workers at Elliott to make their job safer and more efficient.”