Repair Steward
Paid On-Campus Job, Makerspace, Harvey Mudd College
The Harvey Mudd College Makerspace is a collaborative workspace for personal and academic projects. It serves over 2500 users (staff, student, and faculty) across the 7 Claremont Institutions (5 undergraduate colleges and 2 graduate universities).
Key experiences and outcomes include:
- Maintained, repaired, & troubleshoot equipment failures, performed corrective & preventative maintenance on equipment such as laser cutters, FDM/SLA 3D Printers, waterjet cutters, sewing machines, embroidery machines etc.
- Coordinated with 5 other repair stewards to write and update user, safety, & repair manuals for all equipment
- Optimized services by providing remote technical support to other stewards & users, analyzing maintenance logs, & reporting inconsistencies to the head of department
- Taught other stewards how to perform corrective & preventative maintenance on equipment while amending Standard Operating Procedures
Some of my projects in this role include:
- Troubleshooting the Full Spectrum 48 Laser Cutter
- An arc from the high voltage side of the power supply melted insulation and damaged the tube
- A small amount of algae was growing in the water cooling setup, which likely contributed to the arc
- I aided in the tube replacement & deciding future precautionary procedures
- Writing a new user manual for the FDM 3D Printing processes supported by the Makerspace
- This included safety guidelines, slicing & upload procedures, special slicing parameters etc.
- Through this manual, I oversaw a transition from the native slicing and printing process in OrcaSlicer to the 3DPrinterOS Management Software
- Troubleshooting the ProtoMAX Waterjet with multiple failure modes
- One servo driver fried (likely through a small amount of moisture getting through the servo housing, supported by the rubber gasket observed to be cracked post-teardown)
- The mixing tube kept getting clogged, leading to water being sprayed in the opposite direction outside the waterjet housing
- I aided in motor debugging and replacement, performing a full cleanup of the ProtoMAX interior, and contributed to a new ProtoMAX repair SOP
- Writing a new user manual for the Brother PE800 embroidery machine
- This included software guides for Inkscape and Hatch and troubleshooting steps for thread tension
- Through this manual, I observed several failure modes of this embroidery machine model, and wrote guidelines for navigating them in manual