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Originally Posted by sanddrag
... Also, when you have a problem, even more important than getting it fixed is figuring out why the part/assembly failed. What went wrong? If you take a good hard look into why things fail, you'll know what you need to do to prevent it from happening next time. And after you can do this, then you need to develop the "power" to prevent failures from happening the first time.
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In engineering that 'power' is the math of basic physics and mechanics, and the knowledge of material science.
I would not expect a high school student to be able to calculate the stress and shear forces on any mechanical part that I point to, but an engineering mentor should be able to do this. Its a big part of what you learn in mechanical engineering
and that is the trick - designing something that is strong enough for whatever will be thrown at it, but not overdesigned so that it is too big, too heavy, and too expensive.