One of the most important skills to have as an Mechanical Engineer is to be able to design an item with the upmost precision and accuracy. It is critical to have all of the dimensions and angles calculated in order to have the final product that is desired. The task assigned was to create a gasket that is designed to fit on top of a certain aluminum block. This was assigned to test our skills at measuring and designing in SolidWorks. When I first looked at the aluminum blocked, I realized it would be tedious to measure the interior shapes, especially the circles since there is no straight edge to go off of. After more work with Calibers, I found that it is best to measure with the prongs located at the back of the caliber. After a few hours of measurements and sketching, I was ready to design the item in SolidWorks. The top two images represent the front and isometric views of the gasket in the CAD program. The digital gasket was then printed using a CNC Mill, and that is shown on the images second row of images.

There were two mistakes in my sketch that led to an incorrectly made gasket. One of those mistakes was not measuring between the two screwed holes on both ends of the gasket. Because of this, I was not able to fit both ends onto the aluminum block. In the future, I will make sure to calculate the measurements between all the components of whatever it is that I am measuring. The other mistake I made was not considering the roundness of the rectangular corners. When I designed the gasket on SolidWorks, I did not think to chamfer the corners so that it could have a perfect fit. Because of this, the rectangular holes of the gasket ended up being larger than the holes of the aluminum block. For future reference, I now know that I need to pay much more attention to the smaller details of chamfers of a product. When sketching a product, there must be enough information so that anyone can reproduce a perfect gasket. If the sketch is incomplete, or if there are errors in the measurements, the reproduced gasket can never be correctly made. The bottom left image above shows a new sketch, with the missing measurements.