Engine-uity

 

The project consisted of three main goals that helped me to track my progress. First and most evident was the restoration of a dune buggy with the help of my Father in Law. This was the most visual aspect of the project. Secondly, the project had an estimated budget. This required some real time changes along the way, as you can never anticipate everything in this type of project. Last, the project will had an estimated schedule for each foreseeable task. There were things that were not evident at first, and could not be factored in until they were discovered, such as rusted or broken bolts, or minor body work hidden by other features of the buggy. The schedule was also updated in real time as the project progressed.

Goal: The main goal of this project was to create a financial and time estimate plan for restoring a recently purchased dune buggy, and track the actual time and cost as the project progressed. 

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I feel that I reached both parts of my goal, though there were a few unexpected bumps along the way. The financial plan that I created ended up being fairly accurate, though we did go slightly overbudget after making some last minute decisions to make more improvements than we initially budgeted for. Although we ended up spending more than planned, we were very happy with the improvements, and consider them well worth the extra time and money spent.

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In regards to the timeline I also feel like I accomplished my goal of practicing the skill of pre-planning a project. The final time ended up being much shorter in number of days than we anticipated, but much higher in number of hours, and although our timeline was not as accurate, I felt confident that our itemized list of required tasks was very accurate. We only ran into a handful of instances where there was more to be done than we had anticipated, or we made mistakes that needed fixing, but overall we followed the plan fairly closely.

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Outcomes: This project helped me apply and evaluate the estimating, and scheduling skills I have gained in my Engineering courses as they are applied to a large scale project. It will also prepare me for the future by teaching me hands on skills in my desired field, and stretch my abilities. 

The project went as smoothly as we could have hoped. After we did an assessment of the repairs that needed to be made, and the improvements that we wanted to make, my father in law and I sat down together and created what we thought was a realistic budget and timeline. When we began working we did our very best to keep all the receipts from the purchases, and orders we made, and compared them to the budget as we went. We ended up spending more on improvements that we initially planned, but our budget total was fairly close for such an open ended project budget. We were very happy with the final result we got for what we spent. 

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The timeline we laid out as we began was essentially completely scrapped after the first two weeks. It turned out that we were much more enthusiastic about the project than we had anticipated, and we spent several night a week, and every Saturday, and Sunday working on the Buggy. Needless to say we grossly overshot the eight hours a week I had estimated, and we finished much sooner than we thought. Overall I still feel that I got the experience in creating a timeline that I was hoping for, but the aspect of updating minor changes as we went wasn’t really possible with the drastic change in schedule that resulted. I did the best that I could to keep dates of when we accomplished the outlined tasks, and the order in which we did them. In the end I was still pleased with the plan I created, and the practice it gave me. 

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Deliverables: The deliverable for this project is the buggy itself, along with pictures and a step by step explanation of the process of the restoration. In addition I have presented an initial and final adjusted version of both the schedule, and the budget I prepared during the process.