Viken Detection
Summer Mechanical Engineering Intern, 2020
Mechanical Design Experience
I was lucky enough to maintain an in-person internship in the summer of 2020 at Viken Detection, a small company designing handheld security detection equipment in Burlington, MA.
Throughout the duration of my internship, I was working side by side with my mentor to design the enclosure for a new product whose internals had already been defined.
Below you will find a description of the experiences I gained and the things I learned, however due to my NDA I cannot show pictures of my final product here. Please contact me if interested as I can arrange for pictures to be shown if given lead time.
During my time at Viken, I was prototyping daily with our SLA printer to create parts with proper fit and that could be manufactured additively. I was present for all calls with outside vendors and functioned as the point person for a few as we made DFM changes that would increase the success rate and therefore the production speed of my parts.
I was given subsections of the overall enclosure to develop on my own with the expectation that they fit with everything else that was being designed concurrently. Because of this I learned a lot about how to communicate technical details through conversational Mechanical Engineer language.
My internship also exposed me to an engineering release system for managing parts and their revisions. I'm now able to understand how parts flow from prototyping and tinkering to a released, ASME Y14.5 standard, drawing for quoting to vendors and then beyond to full production releases.