Team Duct Tape with Robrady Engineers

Team Duct Tape members enjoyed a remarkable afternoon at Robrady Design on Friday.   Lead Graphic Designer Dave Prager kicked off our tour with a look at the many aspects of Robrady product development, from inception to modeling and prototyping.   Senior Industrial Designer Erik Holmen gave us a look at graphic and industrial design tools and then Senior Mechanical Engineer Glenn Akhavein went over the nuts and bolts of – nuts and bolts, and gears and more, including a look at Pro/ENGINEER models of Robrady’s Rescue Wizard portable winch,  a gas-powered, man-portable winch capable of pulling loads as heavy as 12,000 lbs.  

We also got a good look at the development process for the Vectrix Electric Super Bike and learned about their work with the  HyGreen hand hygiene intelligent technology system .   We also learned how all the engineers work together efficiently and effectively to manage dozens of ongoing projects – with terrific teamwork.

After having lunch with Robrady staff, TDT demoed their robot for everyone, and answered questions about FIRST , and the FTC competition. Mr. Akhavein spent a lot of time with team members, sharing some solid mechanical engineering guidance with students.   

And then, to add icing to the cake of an already great outing, Mr. Prager arranged for us to meet with Battlebots veteran,  Jim Smentowski , the roboticist behind Team Nightmare . At his Robot Marketplace, inside the Hobby Marketplace in Bradenton, we got to see his big bots, Nightmare and Breaker Box , as well as his tiny lightweight, Micro-Nightmare . 

The whole day was just great fun all the way around, and team members came away with new insights and ideas from all the terrific people we met.  We’ve promised Robrady we’ll be back with our new robot when then new season gets underway, and we look forward to a long friendship with this team of great engineers.   And maybe another visit to the Robot Marketplace, too!