Based at our Woodridge plant in Illinois, US

What are your key responsibilities?

As the Lead Engineer for our hub and spindle product line, I handle all new product designs, work with purchasing colleagues on the sourcing of components, and our help operations team with manufacturing deviation reviews.

I really enjoy the variety that my job offers and on any given day I can be working on a wide range of different projects and tasks. Normally in the morning, I’ll have a plan of the projects I would like to tackle, but things may come up in our manufacturing plants in Woodbridge and Estherville that require my attention.

What are you working on at the moment?

My main project focus is on validating certain hub castings at different load conditions. Specifically, developing a test and test fixtures to qualify our 608 hub casting at 8,000 lbs load. If successful, we’ll be able to eliminate the need for a separate 808 hub casting.

I’m also working on sourcing our 35k Profi-Hub casting from a new supplier. This includes making some design changes to enable this casting to also be used for our 50k Profi-Hub line. Test development for this is also underway.

These projects, aimed at consolidating our overall number of castings, will both help to effectively optimize the castings, reducing the weight of the parts.

My team and I are also dedicated to continually furthering our understanding of our complete range, from the components and materials that make them up, to the physics that apply to them in the field. Armed with this knowledge, we’re constantly updating our methods and practices to consistently deliver high quality, high performance products.

Examples of this work range in complexity, from refining our methods through the results of FEA studies, to something seemingly minor like developing the physics to validate whether a hub cap bolted joint is properly specified to retain oil and not leak.

What changes do you think the next five years will bring?

I believe a big focus of our product development will be directed at track systems. This will bring several technological challenges for us, but the agricultural industry is continually moving closer to the use of tracks on big machines to reduce ground compaction.

As a business, we will push hard to meet the needs of this market, with my team and I working on hubs and spindles solutions, where there will be fewer barriers to developing suitable products.