Anukkah Burleson thought there had to be a better solution to fix the whale tail connector on the carrier of her bass drum. Every year, like clockwork, the part would break.
Burleson, a senior mechanical engineering major, is a member of the drumline for the Pride of the Southland Marching Band. She spends every Saturday marching on the field during Tennessee football games, not to mention the countless hours spent each week in practice.
A bass drum can weigh up to 40 pounds and the whale tail connector helps support the drummer’s back and takes pressure off the shoulders. Burleson and her fellow drum members had connectors made from plastic and the wear and tear would cause them to snap or splinter.
“It’s hard to find replacements and they’re pretty expensive. Then, they’re just going to break again. They barely make it through a season,” Burleson said. “Some of us ended up not having one to use or we would try to tape them together just to get through a few weeks.”
Burleson decided to take matters into her own hands. She went to the Min H. & Yu Fan Kao Innovation & Collaboration Studio during the summer to ask about making the parts out of metal. She was introduced to Aidan Schmitz, junior mechanical engineering and the lead consultant at the metal shop.
Burleson and Schmitz devised a plan to make the parts in the Kao ICS and started the project in the fall once everyone returned to school.
Schmitz served as a project manager of sorts. Assistant Professor of Practice Jeff Foote asked him to investigate the plastic part and figure out the best method to make one out of metal.
“The water jet was the most obvious choice, because it’s a two-axis cutter. Every one of the whale tails is a half inch thick. That’s a pretty easy thing to do,” Schmitz said. “We already have that sketch drawn up in Fusion, which you can upload to the waterjet as a DXF.”
Creative Problem Solving
Schmitz and Burleson made 30 of the metal parts, which was “one of the first few times we’ve had something that we’ve made that many of,” according to Schmitz. Burleson has been wearing one on her carrier since the final product was produced.
“It’s been great. It feels the same and works the same,” she said. “I’m planning to replace everyone’s on the drum line, even the ones that have plastic ones that aren’t broken. I want to make sure they don’t break in the future.”
Burleson kept Michael Stewart, the associate director of bands and WJ Julian Endowed Director of the Pride of the Southland Marching Band, updated throughout the entire engineering process.
“Everyone’s been super excited and very supportive about it,” Burleson said. “Any way we can improve the band and make us more comfortable once we’re playing and going out on these long game days is usually a good thing.”
Foote was pleased to see a group of students receive hands-on lessons in creative problem solving and hardware production with practical implications.
“Anukkah identified an issue with the band hardware and worked alongside Aidan to specify a solution, then they worked together to take that solution from theory to reality,” Foote said. “This precisely demonstrates what the KICS is all about and shows what students can do when provided the tools and training to solve their own problems.”
Positive Developments
Given the success of the project, Burleson has considered making parts for other band members beyond UT.
“I do know this is a reoccurring problem for a lot of drum lines,” she said. “I’ve got a friend on drumline who works for a high school drumline, and he asked me if they could get some of these because they have this issue too. It’s definitely something in the back of my head that I wouldn’t mind pursuing.”
Burleson gained valuable skills throughout the part-making experience that she never considered before embarking on the project.
“I learned about the management side of making projects happen,” she said. “I was coordinating communication between the ICS and getting permission from my band directors and making sure they were comfortable with me doing this and writing grant proposals to get the funding to do this. That is something I’ve never done before.”
Burleson will be graduating in December and is considering returning to UT for graduate school. After four years in the marching band, she’s glad one of her last projects involved music and ingenuity.
“I felt like I got to combine two of my passions¾engineering and the drums,” she said. “This project allowed me to finally find something to put them together.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)