Brennan Justice: Design & Manufacturing Engineer in San Diego, CA

Neal Feay Company is a manufacturer of innovative aluminum based in Goleta, CA. Everything that goes through design and engineering at Neal Feay goes through the in-house machine shop, finishing department, anodizing department, and when necessary, graphic arts and shipping. My responsibilities at Neal Feay include detailed CAD work for furniture design projects, prototyping, extensive communication with CNC programming and milling, oversight of manufacturing and assembly. Many of the engineering and design techniques I have learned at Neal Feay have aimed to optimize their manufacturing process by designing for manufacturability. In particular, this includes: • Minimizing number of machining directions, number of parts in assembly • Minimizing raw material while maintaining structural integrity; eliminate material waste • Designing for tool longevity in machining • Designing for ease in assembly, ease in transport, product sustainability, etc. • Creating assembly drawings including BOM and detail drawings, communicating manufacturing instructions regarding sheet metal forming, laser cutting, machining, user assembly instructions, etc.

Within LMU Engineering, I was involved on a research team investigating material properties of structural fabrics. This project was commissioned by the US Navy with the intent of improving quality of living for soldiers at the US Naval Base in Djibouti. Currently at the Naval Base in Djibouti, US Naval officers live in modified shipping containers called CLUs (containerized living units) in which the air temperature can get uncomfortably hot due to the poor ventilation. To help reduce costs on air conditioning, the Navy asked our team at LMU to come up with a cloth material to be constructed into a temporary tent structure that will shade the CLU's from excessive sun radiation and that will resist Djibouti wind storms, which can send sand particles flying up to 120 miles per hour. My responsibility in this project was to design abrasion testing for different material samples. For the abrasion test setup, we decided to buy a sandblaster to simulate high velocity winds and sandstorms abrading the material walls, measuring its decrease in strength by tensile testing the fabric before and after exposure to the sandblaster.

TunesMap is a web/app-based interface aimed to reestablish cultural context to music, movies, and the arts. With the growth of digital music came the collapse of liner notes, photography, video, and cultural context in terms of how it relates to music. The goal of TunesMap is to reconnect the true fans of music with the time, place, genre, and artist of the music that they originally fell in love with. My responsibilities at TunesMap began as an intern researching specific dates in music history and writing about their significance, creating artist pages for musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. After my researching days I became an executive assistant to the CEO and Founder, scheduling his meetings, preparing emails, placing phone calls, and conducting software pitches to modern tech and music gurus such as Tom Freston, Mo Ostin, Tony Berg, Cappy McGarr, helping land over $2.5M in investment.