Summary

Reverse engineering and CAD modeling of campus Maglev train.

In the early 2000's Old Dominion University made a deal with some company that claimed they had the latest, greatest maglev train technology. They installed a track at the University and mounted a vehicle that didn't actually work and then bailed. Some of the professors in the mechanical and aerospace engineering deparments decided to try and fix it. I was employed to help finish up a solid model of the vehicle's space frame, as seen below. We used Autodesk's Mechanical Desktop for the modeling and I had to measure everything by hand to reverse engineer it because the company that built the thing supposedly had no drawings of the machine.