Guttridge staff were delighted to watch a confident and inspiring presentation from a team of students from Boston Grammar School who worked with our design team on the Engineering Education Scheme.  The students had designed and manufactured an impressive, fully functioning chain conveyor to a brief supplied by Guttridge which we were able to view in operation.  They received, deservedly so, a lot of very positive feedback from Guttridge staff for all the hard work and engineering expertise that the project demanded. 

At the recent EES celebration and assessment day, the Boston Grammar Guttridge team were voted 2^nd best out of 52 schools in the student vote, a brilliant achievement and thoroughly deserved.

The project description was To design and build a short chain conveyor section, to test the impact of flight design and machine inclination on efficiency and to provide a test bed for future component testing.۝

Stand Design

As well as designing the conveyor itself, the students were required to design the stand that could be dismantled for easy transportation and would support the heavy machine, ensuring that it would be possible to change the inclination in a safe, efficient and reliable manner.  They achieved this using a simple but very effective design, meaning that the effectiveness of different flights could be measured at different conveyor inclinations from 0 to 15

Project Report

As part of the project, the students had to produce a comprehensive report explaining the issues that they came up against and how these were resolved as well as the results and conclusions of their tests.  This report made really interesting reading, with an enlightening and honest outline of the project.

Project Challenges

The students agreed that the biggest challenge they had to overcome was learning how to use Autodesk Inventor, the design software used by Guttridge.  They needed to learn how to operate this very quickly so they did not fall behind on the strict schedule that the project demanded.

They found the most helpful parts of working with Guttridge were the weekly meetings with the Guttridge design engineer, who kept the project pro-active and ensured that they stayed focused on what was coming up next in the work plan so that they could plan ahead. 

Student  comments

Jason, a member of the student team, commented I feel like the project went well, we all bonded as a team and I feel like I have achieved something along with the completion of the project.۝  Nicholas, another team member added I loved putting the conveyor together as it was all our hard work finally being put together.۝

Benefits to company participants

Simon Hooper, Guttridge Engineering Manager, an enthusiastic participant in the EES, having worked with Boston Grammar School for the last three years, stated We enjoy working with the students and find it a very valuable experience.  Not only are they supplying us with useful data that we will use in the design of our conveying equipment, but they also provide supervisory experience to our staff and a fresh way of looking at things.  The enthusiasm of the youngsters is contagious and this year the group have really excelled themselves.  The conveyor they have designed and built is outstanding and the amount that they have achieved in the given time period is quite exceptional.  They thoroughly deserve to be voted second in the student vote.۝