Kevin Swayze

This is the second year that I am my Formula SAE team's Lead Suspension Engineer and this past summer I designed and developed our latest car's (named F32) outboard suspension. This subsystem on the car includes the hub & wheel center assemblies as well as the uprights. Looking back on it, it was a tremendous learning experience and had greatly developed my design and analysis skills.  Final Front Outboard Suspension Assembly Design  Below is a basic diagram of the design process that I followed while designing this. I find that this is a helpful diagram for teaching new engineers on the team the basic steps that should be taken when designing. This is also the order in which I will step through in this post. Diagram of The Design Process   Objective For this system of the car, the objective was to efficiently design a robust and serviceable outboard suspension assembly. To me, efficiently designing something is when just the right amount of iterating  is perform...

  This project is one of my favorites. I completed this at the end of my senior year of high school for a physics project. The project was very broad, we were required to pick anything that showcased any laws of physics we went over throughout the school year and describe what laws were at play and how the thing we picked worked. I instantly new that I wanted to build a trebuchet which is a great example of energy transfer. I decided on this design after watching Leonard Vance's  YouTube videos  on MURLIN (Multi-Radius Linear Nodes) trebuchets. These kinds of trebuchets use gradually decreasing lever arm lengths to achieve more torque at the beginning then higher speed at the end of rotation just like how a car has a transmission to get it up to speed. I thought that it was such a clever design and could not wait to start building it.  Final MURLIN Trebuchet I used plans found on Leonard Vance's website which helped a lot since I only had about a month to work on thi...

Restoring this Boston Whaler is something that my dad and I worked on while I was in high school. A lot of time and work was put into this and I am not only proud of the results but also grateful of the memories created with my dad. Above is what the boat looked like when we first bought it after cleaning The boat was purchased from someone who had not used it for a few years so when we bought it it had a lot of leaves and other debris inside of it since it sat in the previous owners backyard for a while. The boat was in usable condition when purchased but it definitely had seen better days. The previous owner used it as a tender so it did a lot of sitting in the water which aged it a lot. Despite its old age the hull was still in great condition which is what Boston Whaler's are known for, their great hull construction. They say you can  saw a Whaler in half and it will still float. Here is what the interior looked like prior to restoration, a lot of the wood was sunbeaten a...