FlagShooter Inc

May 2021-August 2021

When I was working at FlagShooter as and engineering intern my main tasks was to help increase the production volume of the company and help design components of the production process. At this internship I got experience in metal fabrication, tolerance stacking, machine programing, and many more areas that are critical to production machines and the design of automated components. Due to the small size of the company I worked directly with the owner/lead engineer. Because of this, all of my work was done independently, this gave me a lot of experience in project planning and the steps that are required to get a task done on time and to specification.

My Projects at Flagshooter

Flag Splitter

The flags in the machine come out in clips of 100 in the same way a nail gun nails come out glued together. The FlagShooter can only use 25 at a time, so to split them was a challenge due to the bend in the flag that is used to push it in to the ground. The current method was to use a box cutter and manually spilt them apart but this was dangerous due to the fact that they were cutting towards themselves.

Video of it working. Video

Production Frames

One of my biggest projects there was to make the main frames that the flag making machine was built on. As seen in yellow and green the frames are made of 2x4 steel that had to be welded together with tight tolerances in mind. This made it challenging because of the warping that welding such a frame together can cause. All of the cutting of the raw material, layup, and welding was done by myself while following blueprints. Once it was completed it was over 25 feet long and weighed over 1000 pounds.

I'm bad at taking photos

Plastic Splicer

When switching out the plastic for the flags, operators would have to manually feed it thought the feeder cutter and tensioner every time. I designed a table that would could splice the plastic together so that the machine would self feed the new color without the need to manually do it.

Forgot to take Photos

Tape Reel

Another project was to make the taping mechanism more reliable. When the machine would advance forward it would sometimes break the tapes that would hold them together, this was bad because the machine would have to be shutdown to refeed the tapes. My solution was to make each of the tapes independent of each other so that they could accelerate independently of each other to reduce forces on them. I also added sensors to the tape reels so that if one would break the operator would know instantly, instead of until they were out of the machine. This greatly reduced waist and helped increase productivity of the line.

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