Our Engineers Can Design and Donate

What do macaroni and cheese, canned soup and tuna have to do with engineering inventiveness at Honeywell Aerospace? These non-perishable food products were key ingredients in creating entries for the second annual Honeywell Aerospace Design to Donate contest.

As part of the events surrounding the 2018 Engineer’s Week (Feb. 24-March 2), 20 teams from Honeywell sites across the world created masterful contraptions out of nothing but non-perishable food items. As if that weren’t tricky enough, they also had to do it in 60 minutes or less.

This year’s designs were impressive, to say the least. From alien spaceships and Olympic torches to Minions and a life-sized R2-D2, the engineers let their creative juices flow for a good cause. Plus, the more than 20,000 pounds of food used to build the complicated creations was donated to local food banks once the competition was complete.

The 2018 winning entry came from a team of out-of-the-box thinkers from Clearwater, Fla. Joseph McMahan and Caleb Sjoquist, both Mechanical Engineers, led a “mega team” of engineers also including Robert Lue, John Wadsworth, Dominique Segura, Shelly Blomgren, Henry Juarez, Brian Kelley, Pamela Raines, Maureen McFadden, Erin Cruff, Wayne Webb, Dawn Vadnais, Steven Vogel and Monica Santiago, to build a heart-stopping Rube Goldberg apparatus.

“As Honeywell engineers we like to create things, but often the projects we work on take years to come to fruition,” said McMahan. “The Design to Donate competition was not only fun and cool, it helped us create a healthy competition among colleagues and, best of all, made a real difference by feeding many of our Clearwater community members at the Homeless Emergency Project.”

The winning submission used dozens of macaroni and cheese boxes acting like dominos to trigger a can of beans to drop, catapulting rockets into the air, knocking down a yardstick tied to a wall of cans. When the cans tumbled, a Honeywell logo made of canned pasta and soup was revealed.

“We are looking forward to competing again next year and defending our Design to Donate championship reign,” added McMahan.