Which success criteria do you think was hardest to achieve and why?

Making the guillotine was easy, but making one that looked nice was quite challenging. Connecting parts with wood glue made the joints extremely strong, but it will also take a long time to glue. Super glue is easy to use but makes it hard to make changes later. Hot glue is the most effective, but it looks messy. Since we were running out of time when we started assembling the guillotine, we used hot glue for assembling as it was the most effective.

What was your 2^nd and 3^rd best idea, and after completing the project, do you think either of those ideas would have worked better than your current idea?

My 2^nd and 3^rd best idea after completing the guillotine was making a miniature helicopter and a small foam motor boat. With the guillotine, we had to work with wood, meaning we had to be accurate and careful when we made our own parts for the guillotine. However, with the helicopter and the motorboat, there are already pre-made parts for the motors and propellers, so we could handle the building process easier. This means we won’t have to rush doing the project and could spend some time improving the looks of the project.

What safety considerations were you reminded of while manufacturing your product?

We had to be careful with all the machines in the lab and wear safety goggles when using any device. We had to hold saws in a specific way when walking with them so we wouldn’t hurt others.

If you had an additional teammate, what aspect of the project would you have assigned them to make your final product better?

If our group had an additional teammate, we would make our guillotine bigger. However, having more people would not be better because more people could lead to more controversial decisions.

If I had another chance to do this project, I would not make a guillotine because there are small parts that makes it complicated to make(our group wasted too much time trying to make the support parts, especially the side support). I would make something like a  foam motorboat or a miniature helicopter for this project because they would be easier to make.

I would say that my project this time is a fail. Out of the three success criteria, we have only been able to achieve one of them. We were able to make the guillotine function, but the blade’s cut was not as smooth as we wanted it to be. Even though the project was a fail for me, I learned a lot of woodworking skills during the two weeks.