YSU Engineering Students 'Flex' for Hynes Industries
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- First-year honors students at Youngstown State University got a chance to flex their engineering muscles for Hynes Industries Inc. Thursday as they presented innovative designs and projects manufactured from one of the long-standing products of the steel service center.
"This project with YSU is one component of a broader project that Hynes is engaged in with our Flex Angle product line," said Hynes Industries' president and CEO, D.R. Golding. "Over the last year, we've developed and ramped up a whole new marketing push."
That marketing platform includes a new website and pages geared specifically toward selling the Flex Angle product, a slotted metal frame Hynes manufactures that can be used in various capacities, Golding said.
Hynes Industries, founded in 1925, operates a steel service center on Oakwood Avenue. The company offers four product lines: strip steel, custom roll forming steel shapes and standard roll forming steel shapes as well as its proprietary FlexAngle.
"As part of the creative ideas as to what you can do with the product, we had the opportunity to engage with the honors engineering students at YSU," The CEO said. "Several weeks ago, we reviewed some of the original ideas and identified those that we would like to see made into models."
Eight students split into pairs, and each team had to come up with two designs and prototypes that use Hynes' Flex Angle product.
Kyle Spickler and Brandon O'Neill, freshmen mechanical engineering students, used the Flex Angle to yield multiple designs, eventually settling on a scaffold and shoe rack.
"We're pretty happy with the results," O'Neill said. "The Flex Angle product is very strong," he added, noting that the team's design used the rack as a brace to support and hold thick wooden planks that form the scaffold.
"The hardest part was coming up with the design and seeing what would work, what wouldn't and what would be possible with the product that we were given," O'Neill said.
Other ideas students hatched included a square frame suspended by chains from a ceiling on which pots, pans or kitchen utensils can be hung. Another idea was to build racks to store firewood.
But it was Gina Mancini and Sean Meditz's design and prototype of a dormitory desk that caught the eyes of Hynes representatives, who selected their project as the best.
"I live in the dorms, and I have firsthand knowledge of how crowded it could be," Mancini said. The team's design focused on a multi-tiered desk designed for two people and takes up little space, but could also be taken apart and used as two single desks.
"It was fun for us to see the concepts come to life," Golding told students after their presentations. What is important, he emphasized, is that students learn the principles of design evolution and the benefits of trial and error.
Professor Kerry Myers said that the idea was to get students working with each other since that's how business and industry operates.
"They came up with concepts individually and then came together as a team so they can build and modify their designs," she said. "In the real world, when you design, you don't design by yourself."
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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