Hudson Keyler: Product Development Engineer in New Castle, IN

I have gained a detailed understanding of manufacturing while working at Honda for the 5 years. Our facility has stamping, welding, plastic injection molding, painting, purchasing, assembly, and quality departments. I work with several cross functional teams in the plant to continuously improve quality of the car and our plant condition. Our 1.3 million square feet facility has produced almost 1 million Honda Civics since the plant opened in 2008. As a current member of our Product development team at Honda, I am the system leader for the rear of the car. I review the design with 2D paper drawings and 3D data with Catia v5. I work with each of our 7 departments to improve the quality and ensure a seamless transition from the design phase to manufacturing phase. I work on a global team that consists of our sister plant in Canada that I communicate with on a daily basis. I also have had the opportunity to work with members from Turkey, Thailand, Japan, and England.

I participated in the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers team at Purdue for the 4 years I was on campus. Our team built a new tube frame car from scratch each year that was powered by a Honda CBR600 F4i motorcycle engine. Our car went to a week- long international competition at the Michigan International Speedway each year. This experience allowed me to understand how a complex product is designed, built, and marketed to competition judges. Machining with a lathe, upright mill, and CNC was my primary function on the team. In addition to machining metal and aluminum parts, we made molds from polymers so that we could make carbon fiber parts. I specifically worked on the intake manifold, seat frame, pedal box, and some body panels.

I worked on several projects during my summer internship. I was able to install a material scrap recycling center, where I directed several contractors to complete the project. I created a test bench to be placed at each operator station to test the tensile strength of the Hefty Trash bags to ensure each batch met customer demands. These test benches were later replicated and implemented across 15 stations.

Photos of completed work available upon request. Worked on Nissan Versa, Pontiac G8, Ford Raptor, Dodge 3500 Mega Cab, and Chevy 1500 exhausts. My job was to outfit prototype exhausts with strain gauges, thermal couplers, string potentiometers, and accelerometers. We would then install an instrumented exhaust into a test vehicle. The vehicle would then be put through harshest conditions at OEM test track. Data would be recorded on a data acquisition unit. Instrumented exhaust would then be removed and placed on test cell at Tenneco facility, where the conditions captured on the test track could be replicated with test equipment and looped to simulate the life of the vehicle. Testing would identify part performance and if there were any failures. After testing was complete, I would compile a summary of the activity with data in a way it could easily be understood to the customer and managers.