Mechanical Design Engineering at CHL Systems

At CHL I worked on twenty projects across eight industries: raw meat, pet food, snack food, confectionery, dairy, agriculture, pharmaceutical, and medical devices. In the same stretch I designed sanitary conveyance for a dairy, fall protection for a railcar unloading bay, a hydraulic splitter for frozen pet food, and a bottle lifter for pharmaceutical production. Learning each industry’s rules quickly was a big part of the job, and with several projects running at once, attention was usually scarcer than design time.

CHL had its own machine and weld shops, and on nearly every project I brought preliminary drawings to the machinist or welder who would make the parts. In a few seconds they could tell me a weld was unreachable or a part would be cheaper in two pieces. It’s the habit from this job I’ve kept the most.

Retrofits usually started with a site visit to capture existing steel, clear heights, and maintenance routes. Structural designs went to our professional engineer for validation. Equipment was trial fit and tested in our shop, and on several projects I went to the customer’s plant to help install and troubleshoot what I had designed. I also did concept and quoting work for customers deciding whether to buy.

Later on, I led design groups while still carrying my own design work. Groups were put together per project, usually two to four designers, and sometimes it was just me and a project manager. The workload didn’t shrink to make room for the leadership, so I had to balance reviewing others’ work against finishing my own.

I also built a design calculator for our standard equipment, and I was one of four engineers designing components and drawings for our DriveWorks configurator, which generated complete conveyor assemblies from a few inputs. Designing parts that have to stay correct across every combination a configurator can ask for is very different from designing something once, and it changed how I constrain models.