r/MechanicalEngineer

Hello, I am a mechatronics student and I have this project I need to do for a motor RPM reductor. The professor told us to use AutoCAD Inventor for the design and calculation, but I simply don't have the space on my PC to download it. I was wondering if anyone knew a good alternative that maybe doesn't take 100GB of space.

Hi! Im a current HS senior on a time crunch ( less than a week to decide 😞) I live in Texas too!

I care about cost, career outcomes, internships, networking, campus life, and whether the school name matters for engineering jobs.

I’m paying for most of college myself, but my parents will help some.

I want to get away from home and become more independent.

I care about having a nice campus and real college experience.

My options:

1. University of South Florida

Location: Tampa, FL

Estimated cost after aid/loans/work-study: around $11k–$13k per year

Pros: I love the campus, Tampa seems nice, good scholarships, farther from home, good engineering clubs/research.

Concerns: Networking and engineering reputation isn't as strong as Texas A&M.

2. Texas A&M Galveston → College Station

Location: Galveston freshman year, then College Station

Estimated cost after loans: around $27k per year

Pros: Best engineering reputation, strong Mechanical Engineering, Aggie Network, career fairs, school spirit.

Concerns: Expensive, no grants/scholarships, and I need a 3.75 GPA to guarantee Mechanical Engineering. Also, I don’t really like College Station.

3. University of Houston

Location: Houston, TX

Estimated cost after aid: around $9k–$12k per year

Pros: Cheapest option, guaranteed Mechanical Engineering, strong Houston job market, close to family/friends.

Concerns: I don’t really want to stay in Houston or commute. I want the full college experience and independence.

4. UT Dallas

Location: Dallas/Richardson, TX

Estimated cost after aid: around $25k per year

Pros: Strong academics, good Dallas job market, tech/engineering opportunities.

Concerns: Campus life seems weak, no football/tradition, and it doesn’t excite me as much.

Main questions:

- For Mechanical Engineering, how much does school name matter?

- Is Texas A&M worth the higher cost and ETAM/GPA risk?

- Is USF a good balance of cost, campus life, and opportunity?

- Should I choose UH because it’s the cheapest even though I want to leave home?

- Does campus life/location matter a lot for motivation?

USF feels like the best personal fit, A&M is the best career option, UH is the smartest financially, and UTD is solid but doesn’t excite me much.

( IK it seems kinda chatgpty but I had no clue how to word this any better or it would have been 3+ pages long)

Any help would be so great!

I've built an online engineering tool aimed at professional aerospace and mechanical engineers. It combines a chat interface with hard-coded calculators for fasteners, stress, buckling, fatigue, and more — designed to be more trustworthy than pure AI by grounding every answer in a curated library of 31 reference textbooks (Bruhn, Shigley's, Peterson, Roark, MMPDS, etc.).

Every AI response includes stated assumptions, conservative margins of safety, failure modes, a confidence flag, and a textbook citation. All work is in IPS units (inches, lbf, psi, ksi). When a problem maps to one of the built-in calculators, the AI hands you off to it so you can iterate locally without burning queries.

What I'm looking for from testers is for them to throw real engineering problems at it — sizing, sanity checks, margin work, whatever you'd normally do by hand or in a spreadsheet. I'm specifically interested in feedback on three things. First, usability: is the UI clear, is the chat-to-calculator handoff smooth, anything confusing? Second, correctness: do the answers, assumptions, and margins hold up against your own judgment or hand calcs? Third, applicability: would you actually use this in your day-to-day work, and if not, what's missing?

Bug reports, edge cases, and brutal honesty all welcome. Testers will get extended access while the feedback period runs.

I start a Mechatronics program at my current technical college next month. Not much maintenance or troubleshooting experience. Does this look like a good apprenticeship to apply for while in school? Not sure if it will or won’t help me in the long run. Does anyone have any experience in this role with Cintas?

Job posting: https://careers.cintas.com/job/Greenville-Maintenance-Apprentice-SC-29605/1362859900/

Hi, I am a recent fresh graduate from a university and I was fortunate enough to land my first job as a mechanical engineer after a few months of searching. I would say maybe it was the fact I had previous mechanical engineering internship which help open the doors for my current opportunity.

The problem is, I feel I am not capable enough. Even during my internship, I still feel inexperience and incapable to be a mechanical engineer. I did decently ok in school but I always dont retain much of what I learn and this put me back to a position where I just dont know what or how to do my work. Call it imposter syndrome but I am just worried I would messed up again and I dont want to disappoint especially when this is gonna be a start of my career.

Any advice for me? Is this even normal to feel that way?

I'm a materials engineering student and I've spent

the last few months building Corvanix — a desktop

app that automatically converts ANSYS files

(.wbpz, .rst, .cas, .dat) into professional

PDF reports.

What it does:

- Extracts solver data automatically

- AI-powered convergence assessment

- Risk assessment + engineering recommendations

Honest question: Would you actually use something

like this? What's missing? What would make it

a no-brainer for your workflow?

Drop a comment or DM — happy to share a demo.

Всем привет! У меня есть Honda Lead 2013 года выпуска на 125cc. Проблема заключается в том, что во время запуска и остановки двигателя через ключ зажигания или подножку издается странный скрипящий звук в зоне вариатора(CVT). Я несколько раз привозил скутер в HEAD центры Honda в Нячанге, производил чистку вариатора, менял ремень, но звук никуда не ушел. Помогите мне пожалуйста понять, что мне нужно сделать, чтобы исправить проблему. Буду Вам очень благодарен!

before I moved into college, I was thinking that most of my time would be spent on the larger components of a system. Frames, motors, giant assemblies, all those stuffs, only to find out it is always the tiny stuff, which pulls you down.
Recently, I had to spend days troubleshooting a fluid control system as a personal pet project. On record, all was well. However, in practice, all the flow rates were random, and the pressure drops did not actually make sense. The culprit? Needle valves. It is not a broken one, and it is not even as such that it is one of those cheap pieces that you can find on Alibaba or eBay. I believe that it is only a bit inconsistent in its behavior in the real world.
It is such a joke how I would compare specifications all the time that all appeared to be the same, yet acted differently once installed. I believed that back then it was mere inexperience. Now I am not so sure any more.
It’s something about these tiny parts that does not entirely appear on datasheets. Tolerances accumulate, production variations creep up, and no longer is your simple system simple. Wonder whether or not others run into it as frequently as I do. Do you over-spec these components now, test a number of samples, or simply accept some degree of unpredictability?

How can i get into Apple as a Mechanical Engineer or am i being overly delusional 😔 If yes how can i start from scratch, iam an Final year student from tier 3 college currently doing internship in an defence related organisation in India

Thank you in advance

Hi everyone,

I’m a mechanical engineering student entering my 7th semester, and I need to complete a 6-month internship as part of my curriculum.

The thing is, I’m currently involved in my core interest area (web3 projects, tech), and I feel like stepping into a full-time mechanical internship might slow down my momentum.

I’m looking for advice or connections to companies (preferably mid-sized or larger private limited companies) that offer flexible or less intensive internships — something that allows me to get certificate of completion and still continue my ongoing work.

Requirement -

The company should be in India (except Nagpur)
I just need a certificate; I will not visit.

If anyone has suggestions, referrals, or has been in a similar situation, I’d really appreciate your guidance.

Thanks!

Hey fellow engineers, just recently received an offer for a gas utility company. To anyone working in the industry what’s some major things to learn? My experience has been in drainage, concrete, low pressure pipe design. New experience for me since I’ll be doing lots of risk assessments for gas lines.

Hi, I'm working on a project where I have a channel that is currently not producible with additive manufacturing. It's a channel with multiple 90-degree angles and a decreasing diameter (it has a rectangular cross-section). I've done CFD with nTop to find the exit pressure. So I now have an inlet pressure (200 bar) and an outlet pressure (50 bar).

Would it be possible to create a generative channel that decreases the pressure by the same amount, based on the starting pressure values?

I want to maintain the temperature of liquid in IBC totes. I plan to use rigid foam insulation between the cage and tank, with a grid of copper pipe or tubing under the tank (over the insulation) circulating hot water to provide heat. Where can I find data on how much weight various tubes and pipes can withstand before being pressed flat?