Our students this week are brothers Zachary and Nicholas Menning. Both are mechanical engineering majors who accepted a co-op at Nissan Motor Manufacturing Corp. U.S.A., located in Smyrna, Tennessee.
Both worked in the Car System Ring Line, the area of the plant where the engine, front sub frame, and rear sub frame are decked to the partially assembled car body. Over the plant’s summer shutdown, their group has been working on installing new equipment and making some facilities changes to accommodate production for future models.
They have been assisting with the demolition during the beginning of the shutdown and will be modifying a few assist devices later in the week. This involves a lot of hands on work—tearing down conveyors, modifying machine parts, and creating CAD drawings to reflect these modifications. All of this experience—drawing with AutoCAD, working with the machine shop, and re-assembling equipment—will all be very helpful to them when they resume engineering classes at UT.
In the photo at right, the brothers are standing next to two identical copies of the recently Launched 2016 Nissan Maxima. Over the last year, they have been working with process engineering group to prepare the Smyrna plant to launch this vehicle. Although they haven’t both been working with the same model vehicle, work for both of them has involved designing part sub-assembly fixtures, measuring and evaluating trial vehicles on the production lines, and working with vehicle design engineers to solve issues that the plant team finds during trials.
Through their experiences at Nissan, the Mennings have been able to work with many different groups of people—from the shop floor technicians to design engineers from Japan to company executives—that each have different perspectives and new ideas about how to solve problems. After learning about and experiencing all the hard work required to launch a brand new vehicle, it was a proud moment for the brothers to stand next to these brand new cars that will go to their customers.
Zack and Nick Menning agreed that investigating and measuring vehicles in the lab, writing technical reports, designing fixtures, and working with the shop floor manufacturing team have all been very valuable experiences that will benefit them for the rest of their engineering career.