Eight work stations, four computer-aided modeling machines, and supporting software are provided for a computer-aided drafting and manufacturing laboratory. This laboratory will offer a relatively inexpensive facility to give students hands-on experience in computer- aided manufacturing. The facility will be used in two contact classes in mechanical engineering and will support several others on student projects. One of the two contact classes will be required of all students in mechanical engineering to give them an introduction to CAM. The equipment proposed will be such that each student will be required to design (on a workstation) a simple part, development the NC information, and then machine the part in wax on the computer-aided modeling machines. In an elective course on CAD/CAM, the students will be given much more extensive projects. In a project course on the design of experiments, the equipment will be made available for the design and fabrication of small parts required in various experiments. The CAD part of the facility will also be used by students in a senior design project course and in a senior/graduate student elective course on computer aided design. A low-end workstation approach is taken for the facility because of the low cost involved and because more and more of the students who graduate from mechanical engineering will be using this type of facility rather than large CAD/CAM facilities based on expensive mainframes.
