Before my senior year of high school I was a summer intern at The Cooper Union. I worked on the Mechanical Engineering Project under Professor Dell, and his TAs James Baker and Subashis Paul. My team and I, which included classmate Robert Walsh, worked on a solar thermoelectric project. The goal was to find ways to utilize “waste heat” and we developed a system which focused sunlight onto copper sheet which created a significant heat difference between the copper plate and a heat sink. A thermocouple was then placed between the hot and cool bodies, and power was made. I look back on that work proudly, but also laugh at how far I've come from it in such a short time.
Still tracking this down from my groupmates, I have changed computers since then and have lost most of this project.
I was teaching my friend how to use Solidworks and decided that a guitar would be a cool exercise. However, I also decided to go all out and try to dimension this as closely as possible to a certain type of guitar. Different dimensions affect the sounds produced, so I was careful in being accurate. The pegs, on the other hand, I gave up on and just copied what a violin would look like.
An iris of sorts was the one of the first throttle concepts. Throttle featured in the FSAE section
I was in a musical, and a character needed to play a piano on stage. So the plan was he'd play a keyboard since lugging an actual piano on stage for a scene or two is unreasonable, but the hangup was that the show was so supposed to be in 1959 so the modern keyboard would be awkward and tacky. So I told the director I'd make a mock upright piano for the stage, and much to her surprise and delight I showed up with a piano in a week. I modeled it in solidworks for fun, and built it out of scrapped plywood and spindles. Stage crew dolled it up later, I was busy being a star.