 Welcome to Hard Parts Engineering. Get the coolest toys in the building. Our department is responsible for conceptualizing, designing, prototyping, and finalizing all of the hard parts that Cobb sells. So we take the initial design idea from the group that's thinking about what kind of new products we might want to offer, bring that into a CAD environment or maybe a prototyping environment in the lab, and then we actually deploy that to a vehicle and run a certain amount of testing on it until we're confident that it's ready for mass production. Our motto in Hard Parts is pretty straightforward. I'm not going to design anything that I wouldn't put on my own car. The way we've got the group set up is that the director is at the top, followed by three levels of engineers and performance mechanics, and then the intern at the bottom. The director is responsible for the long-term vision of the group, including the product road map and what we might be working on in the next 12 to 18 months. The senior level engineer, engineer 3, would be responsible for process improvement as well as mentorship of junior engineers and sort of adding design review throughout the process. A junior engineer is responsible for ownership of a product completely, taking it from conceptualization all the way to the market. And then we have performance mechanics who are responsible for taking care of all of our vehicles, helping us install parts, as well as doing some amount of design work on their own. And then we have the intern that helps us out wherever we need it, including designing his own parts and doing typical intern work. I mean, I'm not going to clean out the plasma table, so somebody has to do that, you know what I'm saying? So what makes the position at Cobb different from other companies is that the hard parts engineers here are expected to be responsible from the product, from the time of initial conception, through prototype and testing, and then finally on to product release and field support. Because we're a small group, you're generally also the one that installs your parts, so you're not going to be handing that off to somebody to test and then hopefully getting some feedback. You're going to actually do the work and understand exactly how our customer is going to go through the installation process when they put it on their vehicle. So that level of complete ownership and support allows us to act on direct feedback from our customers, whether it's good or bad, and constantly improve and give them what they want in a product. As an engineer at Cobb, you have access to all the cool tools we have here. We've got a really nice shop that we just renovated last year, added a lot of new lifts. We've got a lot of really nice reverse engineering tools like a faro arm scanner that can give us geometry data off of the vehicles to build parts for. After you've 3D printed the part, maybe you're going to go over to the welding fabrication area and work with those guys on the tube bender to get it bent to your specification. Go over to the lathe and turn down a part to put onto it. Go over to the TIG welder to actually assemble the whole kit and then take it to the car and install it yourself so that you get the true feel of what the customer is going to experience when they put your part on their car. A typical day at Cobb is actually pretty atypical. You might start out at your desk doing some solidworks work that day. You might actually be out making the parts that you designed a couple weeks back so that you can then test it on a vehicle. In addition, you might be visiting with the welders on site working through some technical issues that we've had. One really cool thing that we had the opportunity to do recently was during testing of our front mount intercooler for the Raptor we actually took a group out to a local off-road motorsports park and beat the crap out of the truck, got a lot of good marketing videos but also actually tested it in the environment that it's intended use is. So immediate feedback as to whether or not we just stiffened up a bracket here or how it was going to perform, but that was a lot of fun. I was excited to see the team get to do that. As an engineer at Cobb, you do get to travel a little bit. We have a couple of trade shows we like to attend during the year such as SEMA and PRI and then vendor visits are a pretty big part of what we do. We like to establish a good relationship with our vendor that includes going to the site and checking out their manufacturing facility. There are a lot of learning opportunities for engineer here that matter your skill level. For the more junior guys, we have in-house manufacturing with some excellent welders and fabricators that can kind of guide you through what your part might actually look like when it's made into reality. So that's a hard thing for young engineers a lot of time to understand what that part needs to look like to be able to be manufactured properly. Even for the senior guys, speaking of somebody who's been a mechanical engineer for 10 years I thought I was a car guy before I came here but having the opportunity to work closely with calibration and some of the reverse engineers makes me realize how much I have left to learn about the industry. You have to be an enthusiast to work at Cobb in the hard parts department. You need to understand the passion that our customers bring to their cars and that has to be in you as well so that you can make the best possible product. So we've got typically engineers or people that have been building cars since they were little kids. So we've got some turbo four-cylinder guys, we've got some muscle car guys and some muscle truck guys nowadays. So I want people that are not afraid to speak their mind when it comes to design. I want differing opinions and different backgrounds so that we have maybe a full range of what our customer expectations might be. We want a little bit of everything honestly. We don't want every single person to be the same because if we have that then we're going to make the exact same products forever. We want somebody who's not afraid to try something a little bit different than maybe we've done before or maybe the rest of the industry is doing. What do I really think about my coworkers? I think we may pick on the intern a little bit now and again but I think we really do have one of the most tight-knit teams of any place that I've ever worked. We get to use the shop after hours and it's pretty typical to see us hanging out and wrenching on somebody's car late into the evening. At the end of the day the main thing that makes the hard parts team awesome is that we take personal pride and responsibility for the products we support. We have some really creative engineers and Cobb as a company is willing to provide us the tools that we need to turn out great hardware. What motivates me here at Cobb is that feeling that you get when you get the opportunity to get out to an event and talk to some customers that are running your parts on their car and they're sharing their stories with you about what they plan to do next. If a part that you design can make someone's enjoyment of one of their biggest investments in life that much better that's a huge sense of accomplishment.