My name is Scott Harlan and I am a professional mechanical engineer based in Salinas, California.  I have designed and managed for a variety of companies around the world as both an employee and engineering consultant. This design and management experience has included prototype agricultural equipment, trailers, military vehicles, motorcycles, and aircraft ground support equipment.    

Over twenty years of mobile equipment design experience has included a wide array of prototype machinery, fabrications and machine components.  Selecting the best process to manufacture a part is a vital key to making a cost effective and reliable design. With an intimate familiarity with the capabilities and limitations of typical fabricating processes, I can efficiently create reliable and cost effective design.  This familiarity with processes includes an understanding of the tolerances produced through methods such as flame cutting, plasma cutting, laser cutting, and water jet cutting.  The design of sand castings, investment castings, die castings, and plastic molded parts is also within the scope of my experience.  By choosing the best process to make parts, the product cost can be reduced.

I have conducted feasibility studies on multiple projects to evaluate the estimated cost and performance new machines.  This can be a valuable tool to verify that there is a reasonable return on investment before spending large sums of money.

In addition to machine design experience I have substantial experience managing engineering projects, groups, and departments. Some of these engineering projects have included the intricacies of coordinating engineering efforts from different engineering groups around the world.  Many projects included developing prototypes on short time frames with tight budgets. Other projects have been tightly focused on optimization to achieve the best possible machine cost or reliability.  If you need help managing a mechanical engineering project or group, I can help.