Our CTE instructors and students love it when we can help community members in practical ways.
Bob Vanderboegh was looking for the capability to produce new cleats for his model bulldozer as the original cleats were breaking down and needed repair. He contacted our Engineering Design program to see if this task could be accomplished.
Our student, Hunter, agreed to take on this project and started by completely measuring one of the original cleats. He then used SOLIDWORKS to draw this part up in 3D. Hunter printed multiple prototypes, and each time would go back to SOLIDWORKS and tweak the part to get it as accurate as needed.
After this process, Hunter printed 31 cleats for each track and Mr. Vanderboegh put the cleats back together with pins. He was extremely happy and indicated that the tracks worked better than the original. The toy bulldozer is the same model that helped to build the Alaskan Highway. Mr. Vanderboegh has both the toy model and the real bulldozer.