During my co-op with a local automotive performance shop, an issue arose where no two exhaust manifolds leaving the shop were the same. Each piece of the exhaust manifolds used to be oriented by hand, leading to discrepancies from manifold to manifold. To solve this, I designed trays to hold each nominal manifold piece in place while tacking them together to ensure each exhaust manifold was identical.
The main design problems I had to work around while designing these exhaust manifolds and trays were as follows:
- Each tray must hold each piece snug enough to ensure that no piece could be incorrectly oriented.
- Each tray must consist of 2 parts to accommodate for the middle weld of the runner.
- Each tray must be designed so that is can be easily modified/adjusted.
With this eight-month Co-op position, I was privileged to have the time to see the trays I designed used in a real-world application. This allowed difficulties and issues not anticipated in the first iteration to be identified and corrected. Subsequently, a second and then final version of the easy to use and quick to manufacture tray system was produced.
